[yep]

There seem to be a ton of threads on the topic of amp emulators, why I don't sound as good as the examples or someone's youtube vid, etc. So I thought I'd start a thread specifically on the topic of recording digital guitar with an emulator.

To get things rolling:

1. The guitar matters, a lot. Almost certainly more than it matters with a great amp. Analog preamplification stages are bi-directional, meaning, when the guitar (or mic) pushes the preamp, the preamp pushes back. Especially with crude stuff like guitar signal. Digital cannot realistically reproduce this, and it's the single most limiting technical factor of digital guitar amp emulation-- any distortion that can be recorded digitally can, by definition, be produced digitally given sufficient processing power and design effort, but the digital system cannot "push back" against the output current of the guitar the way an analog system does. So you really need to set up your guitar correctly. You don't necessarily need a million-dollar guitar, but digital is a lot less forgiving to poor setup or "bad" guitars than analog is. More on this below.

2. Layering tracks is much harder with digital emulators than with real amps. Unless the digital processor is set with some kind of randomizing function or whatever, the digital emulator is applying the exact same processing to whatever goes through it. For this reason (I suspect), double-tracking digital guitars often results in a thinnish, phasey sound compared to double-tracking guitars through a real tube amp that responds slightly differently every millisecond due to temperature, age, voltage sag, whatever. I'm guessing as to the cause but the effect is pretty noticeable. If you want to multi-track the same guitar part, you often have to use different brands of emulators to avoid a fake and "synth-y" sound.

3. You probably have to make your own presets. Because electric guitar is such a crude and imprecise instrument (although a wonderfully sensitive and expressive one), what works for one guitar does not necessarily work for another, even of the same make and model (more on guitar setup below).

4. This is huge: get in touch with your parametric EQ. For reasons unknown to me, digital guitar effects, even when they sound quite good, tend to leave a certain imprint of fizzy trash at certain frequencies, most often in the 2kHz~11kHz range. Set up a parametric eq with a sharp boost (say, +10dB with a Q of 3 or higher), and sweep around that upper midrange. What you are looking for is places where the EQ'd guitar sounds like a steady-state whine, with no change between notes, chords, beats, or whatever. Ten-to-one says you find at least one such frequency. When you do, zero in on the most obnoxious, offensive frequency (the one that sounds most like high-pitched fan noise, for lack of a better example) and turn the boost into a cut. You'll have to play around with Q and cut amount to find the best compromise, but a one or two such rips can make a huge improvement in a fizzy or nasal guitar tone (analog or digital, but digital amp emulators seem to be the worst offenders). You might find similar offenders in the lower mids, or anywhere else. It's trial-and-error to figure out how much and how many cuts you can get away with before killing the guitar sound, and sometimes it works better BEFORE the distortion/amp simulator, but usually after. But once you have it set up, it tends to work pretty well as a preset/template for that guitar sound.