What is SimulAnalog Guitar suite?
It is a suite of vst plugin with amplifiers and analog processors for guitarists, actually containing the simulation* of:
- Boss DS-1 (Distortion stompbox)
- Boss SD-1 (Super Overdrive stompbox)
- Tube Screamer (Overdrive stompbox)
- Oberheim PS-1 (Phaser stompbox)
- Univox Univibe (Modulations stompbox)
- Fender Twin 1969 (Guitar amplifier)
- Marshall JCM900 Dual Reverb (Guitar amplifier)
Why SimulAnalog Guitar Suite?
This suite is not a commercial product. It is born inside an academic research project about the modelling of electric devices, and then applied to the musical instrument field as an evolution of the techniques currently available in some commercial units. Its most important feature is the extremely high precision of the simulation, which is about indistinguishable from the original sound.
Many commercial amp simulators claim state of the art modelling techniques inside the product and say things like "every component in the audio path of the original instrument has been accurately modelled". But sentences like this are more like advertising and are not supported by technical papers describing what really happens in the product. Besides, many of the processors have to run all the simulation algorithms on a low cost DSP to keep as low as possible the cost of the hardware. That's why the models they use should be as simple as possible, but... not so close to the real gears they want to emulate.
But of course in the advertisement they have to claim incredible thecnological prodigies to stay competitive with the other products.
What about SimulAnalog Guitar Suite? It is a freeware and no profit set of plugin. Born as a test bench for SimulAnalog research, we saw that without any effort it could be distributed to musicians that may find it useful. That's why it is given as is, with no support and with a very rough user interface.
But we can assure that "every component in the audio path of the original instrument has been modelled, except for the secondary effects of some active devices" and that "the response of each original device have been compared with the respective simulated response, obtaining less than -40dB of difference" without any particular commercial interest saying that.
