Guitaritis

Description

Live 11 version now available!

Attention axe-wielders!

The Guitaritis pack multiplies your arsenal of go-to guitar amps for use in-the-box in Ableton Live. By combining each possible pair (and a couple trios) of Ableton’s Amp device models, pairing them with ideal cabinets and gain-staging them at multiple points along the chain with extreme care. A suite of 35 “Combamps” were created which greatly increase an electric guitarist’s range of achievable tones—and also their efficiency at applying them.

Because of the delicate technical calibration (tested via stratocaster, les paul, and pink noise), when you turn the macro knobs your levels stay as neutral as feasibly possible, meaning less time is spent adjusting imbalances, the phantom of “louder is better” won’t bite, and you can focus on finding the sweet spot of distortion and tonal contour you desire. This is achieved with multiple points of gainstage compensation embedded into the chains, matched to keep levels generally within 1LU.

Fine-tuning distortion is possible to a more precise degree than ever. By carefully adjusting the Drive, Bias, and Gain Stage parameters, one can sculpt the exact amount of roughness and grit that is called for in a particular track, with the relative output level staying similar. It makes it way easier to objectively tell what’s really happening to the tone than by using a single drive control which boosts the gain (that then has to be adjusted).

Combamps are blended into mono by default, because that usually is appropriate for guitar tracking and gives a very clear view of the resultant end tone. However, they are equipped with stereo spread which moves the amps apart from each other, one to the left and one to the right. Each amp channel has been gainstaged individually to minimize the tonal contour offsets caused by different amps reacting in different ways to different guitars (in other words, the signal does its best to stay equally perceptible on both sides no matter what).

Just after the custom-calibrated preamp emulation for extra analog mojo, each Combamp has an insert slot designed for dropping in any of the 25 included Stomper pedal effect racks which are lovingly based upon actual guitar pedal functionality.

Versions exist for both Live 9 and Live 10.