ALL-ANALOG Amp Modeling! Carl Martin Ampster Demo

A little amp sim with a big difference! In this video, we check out a new amp modeling solution by the good folks over at Carl Martin. The Ampster is 100% analog. It comes equipped with a real tube preamp. It's pedalboard-friendly. And it sounds great! Here, we deep-dive through the tones. And discuss the various creative options for using this pedal in your own rig. The perfect all-analog option for a silent stage? Let's check it out!

​Products Featured

Carl Martin Ampster: https://www.carlmartin.com/ampster
Carl Martin Red Repeat: https://www.carlmartin.com/red-repeat
Carl Martin DC Drive: https://www.carlmartin.com/dc-drive
Archetype Nolly: https://neuraldsp.com/plugins/archetype-nolly

​Video Transcript

Howdy, friend. You’re here in the studio with Luke from GuitarIQ.com. In today's video, we're going to check out a little amp simulator with a big difference. You won't find hundreds of different amp models and effects to choose from. There's no software or app that comes with it. There's no USB or Bluetooth connectivity. No programs or presets, or midi, or any of the other things that you might usually associate with an amp modeler. So what exactly is this mysterious box of tone? Well, it’s an all-analog amp modeler. It comes equipped with a real tube preamp. It's designed to emulate perhaps one of the most famous amps of all time. And it's all housed in a relatively compact, pedalboard-friendly format. The product to which I refer is one of the newest pedals in the Carl Martin lineup. The friendly folks over there recently sent me one to check out. So in today's video, we're going to look at what this pedal is and what it sounds like. We’re going to explore how you might use this with software you potentially already own for home recording. To kind of get the best of both worlds—analog and digital. And we're going to chat about some of the more creative ways you might incorporate a pedal like this into your rig.

So, if that sounds interesting then please click on that like button to let me know. And to help show that YouTube algorithm a little bit of love. As always, as you go through the video feel free to leave any comments or questions or thoughts or feedback you have in the comments section below. While you're there make sure to check out the description. I've left timestamps for everything if you want to jump around to certain sections or revisit different parts—I won't be offended, I promise. And finally, before we get started I warmly invite you to head over to GuitarIQ.com to check out some of the great books and other learning resources we have waiting for you over there. Covering everything from fretboard memorization, to chord theory, to warm-ups and workouts for guitar players, and a whole bunch more. That is GuitarIQ.com. And with that let's head over to the workbench and get stuck into the video.

If you ignore the completely random, and not intentionally placed to look artistic pedals, on the border of this image… The pedal we're looking at today is this bad boy here in the middle. This is the Ampster by Carl Martin. And just so you have some context for what you're looking at. The knobs across the top control your gain staging and EQ settings. This switch here lets us mute the pedal. The LED blinks accordingly, as you can see. And the switch on the left moves between our two different cab sections. So before we chat about it, let’s just hear it in action. The signal chain for today is my Revstar guitar (with P90’s) going straight into the Ampster. The Ampster is then feeding my interface via the XLR out. And that's it. These pedals on the side are plugged in but they're currently switched off. So here is the obligatory knobs-at-noon setting, just as a starting point. I’ve got the gain set relatively clean and it sounds a little something like this:

(Audio Example)

As you can hear, there's quite a difference in the voicing of those cabinets. This green setting is intended to emulate the sound of a 4x12 closed back cabinet. Whereas, the red setting is modeled after the sound of an open back 2x12 cabinet. So it's a little brighter, a little airier, and there's a little less body. Let's start with this 2x12 cab, and let's dial things in a little bit. I'm going to leave the bass and middle where they are. I just want to soften those upper mids a little bit. Then, compensate with some presence. Okay, the next thing I'm gonna do is switch in a little bit of delay. This is the Red Repeat, again by Carl Martin. I’ve got this set up in the loop of the Ampster. This short delay/slap back type sound is really perfect for adding a bit of depth and ambience to the sound. The Red Repeater is very much voiced after a kind of darker, analog, tape-style delay. So it works really well for this type of thing. And here is my clean setting:

(Audio Example)

Okay, now let's add a little bit of overdrive into the mix. This is the DC Drive again by Carl Martin. It’s a really nice overdrive pedal that does everything from a subtle boost right up to a really saturated lead-guitar tone. I've done a separate video on this pedal if you want to check it out, I’ll link to it in the description. I’ve currently got it set just as a mild boost to push the Ampster a bit harder. And it sounds a little something like this:

(Audio Example)

Let's move over to the green cabinet and try the same thing. As I mentioned, the green mode is emulating a 4x12 closed back cabinet. So it's a thicker, rounder sound. You may have noticed, when I was switching between the cabinets before, there is a lot more bottom end here on the green setting. If you find there's too much with your particular setup, to help compensate for that Carl Martin have rather thoughtfully put a little voicing switch on the back of the unit—which can attenuate the bottom end in a couple of different ways. Here, I’ve just got it set to the most open setting. But we will dial this EQ in a little bit differently. We’ll take out a bit of that bottom end to start with. Leave the mids and treble roughly where they were for the 2x12 cab. And we'll just bump up a little bit more presence. And this is what my clean tone sounds like:

(Audio Example)

Now, adding a little bit of overdrive:

(Audio Example)

So, hopefully that's given you a bit of a feel for what the Ampster sounds like. And the difference between the two cab settings. So far I've had this set up as a relatively clean pedal-platform type of sound. One of the questions you're probably wondering at home is: How much gain is on tap here? So let's test that out now. I will move to the bridge pickup of my guitar, to push this a little harder. Let’s turn off the overdrive for now. And here's what it sounds like winding up the game. Here’s our clean tone for reference:

(Audio Example)

Moving to 50%:

(Audio Example)

Up to about 75%. I can't really see because of the reflections but here we go:

(Audio Example)

All the way 100% gain:

(Audio Example)

Let's switch back to the middle position and see how this cleans up:

(Audio Example)

So, that was just me riding the volume knob a little bit. Now let's boost 100% gain with some overdrive. And see how much saturation we can get out of this. Bridge pickup again:

(Audio Example)

Okay, so depending on the type of pedal you use, and the output of your pickups, that's somewhat reflective of the type of gain you're going to be able to get out of this. Now, I’m reliably informed that the Ampster is very much modeled after a vintage Super Lead-style Marshall amplifier. And one of the things with those original Plexi amplifiers is, they often don't have as much gain on tap as we sometimes think they did. Certainly, nothing close to a more modern style of Marshall amplifier. Like a JCM800 or something like that. And that's definitely reflected here. You saw below 50%, we're getting some nice clean tones. Around about 50%, it starts giving us edge of breakup, slight saturated tones. And as we wind up above 50%, we get very much into tube saturation territory. I’m thinking, you know, blue sounds, classic rock sounds, things like that. At no point in the gain range are we gonna get that fire breathing, face melting, high gain, ultra-distortion sound. That’s really not what this pedal is designed to do. Of course, you could get that sound depending on the pedals you stack with the Ampster. And that's kind of the point. For me, this really shines as a platform type of pedal. You put it at the end of your pedalboard. You dial in a sound that you like. And then you use your pedals to switch in and out different effects based on the gain stages and the colors that you're after.

Thus far, I've been demonstrating how to use the Ampster in the simplest, easiest way possible. Using the XLR output and just making use of the onboard cab emulations. But there's another way we can set this up. I could imagine this is the sort of pedal that some people will want to have on their desktop, maybe with a couple of their other favorite pedals for home recording. And in the context of home recording, for those who are wanting to get a little more hands-on with their tone and want a little bit more versatility, we can actually set this up to be a standalone tube-based preamp on the front end and then use software on the back end to model the cabinet side of things. Why would we want to do that when I've already demonstrated that there's a couple of nice cabinet sounds onboard? Well, in the context of a live situation, this probably isn't something you'd worry about. However, in the context of recording, for those wanting a bit more tweakability from their tone, the method I'm about to show you allows you to have more control over your tone at any stage in the process—even after you've recorded your tracks, when it comes time to mix your project.

So, how do we set this up? Well, unfortunately there's no way to switch off the cab emulation from the XLR directly. So the workaround for this is using the effects Loop of the Ampster. Specifically, the effects send. If we come out of the send of the Ampster, straight into the input of our interface, that's going to give us the sound of the preamp minus the cab emulation section. In this context, because I still want to record the Red Repeat, I'll come out of the send into the Red Repeat. And instead of sending this back into the return of the Ampster, I’ll use a standard instrument cable to go from the Red Repeat into the instrument input of my interface. So just give me a quick second to set that up here. And let's jump into the computer to check out why you might want to try this out at home.

Okay, so here we are within Logic Pro. The software that you're currently looking at here is the Archetype: Nolly plug-in by Neural DSP. If you're not familiar with Neural DSP, they’re a company doing all sorts of amazing things in the world of amp simulation—this plugin is no exception. This is something they've recently sent to me to check out. And the reason I wanted to feature this plugin in today's video was that, one of the big selling points of this plugin when it was released was just how much love, attention, and detail Nolly put into capturing the cabinet sound of this plug-in. I think he captured well in excess of 600 impulse responses to bring you the sound of 4 of his favorite cabinet and microphone combinations. There are lots of different software solutions you can get to do this sort of thing, to simulate the sound of different speakers in different rooms. The great thing about the method I'm going to show you here, is that hopefully this is something you can try out at home without having to necessarily buy any additional software. As long as you have some kind of amp simulator plugin that allows you to switch off the modeling part of the plugin.

So, if I come over here, you can see this plugin is chocked with different amps and effects. We have post EQ and some reverbs and delays. There's a lot more here than what we're going to cover in today's video. The only section we're really concerned with here is this cabinet part. So again, the signal chain is the Ampster feeding Logic Pro and then we're using this to model the cabinet side of things. Now, it is worth noting if you're going to try this out, using the send on the Ampster not only bypasses the cab section of the Ampster it also bypasses the master output. So you need to set the input volume based on the gain knob of the Ampster. Given that, this method really works better with those pedal-platform clean type sounds we've been talking about. But once we've set this up, straight away we can do things like start changing the cabinet:

(Audio Example)

We can swap in and out different microphones:

(Audio Example)

And we can experiment with the position of those microphones:

(Audio Example)

And we can stay here as long as we want, tweaking things until our hearts are content. So it really is the same type of setup you would have if you were using a real cabinet in the room with you. Except here, you don't have a big 4x12 cabinet blasting you in the back of the head. Everything is housed here nice and quietly and neatly in the digital realm. So let's come up here to the default that I set up earlier. Again, we have the Red Repeat delay switched on. The only other thing I'm going to switch on up here is this tape delay. It's just a subtle stereo effect for no other reason than I like how it sounds. So here's my clean sound:

(Audio Example)

Let's engage the DC Drive, once again:

(Audio Example)

So, a slight tangent there on a different way to set up and use the Ampster. But, hopefully, something you found interesting and definitely something worth checking out if you're looking to use the Ampster for any kind of recording.

Hopefully, that's given you a pretty good overview of what this unit does and what it sounds like. And some of the different ways you can use it. All-in-all it really couldn't be simpler. You just treat this the same as you would any kind of normal, single-channel amplifier. You dial in a sound you like, stack it with some pedals that work well together, and then, happy days. But despite the fact that this unit is pretty straightforward and easy to use, there are quite a few ways you could potentially make use of this in your rig. For example, you could use this in combination with your current amplifier. On the back of the unit we have a link output, which is basically a direct feed from your guitar or any pedals you have stacked in front of the Ampster. We could send that to our amplifier on stage, which could be our on stage volume, and then we could use the XLR output from the Ampster to be our main quote/unquote “mic'd signal” that we send to front of house. Alternatively, we could use the Ampster in parallel with our main amp to set up a wet/dry rig without having to lug around two tube amps. That could certainly be a handy way to use this.

Or for another option, if this is sitting at the end of your pedalboard, you can use the effect send (like we were doing before) to feed the front end of your amplifier. If you wanted to try this out as a always-on, global, tube-based, tone-shaping, preamp-style EQ at the end of your pedalboard. That could be interesting. In a similar way, you could use the send of the Ampster to feed the power amp of your amplifier. So a great example of this would be, if you had a little solid state amp like a little Boss Katana or something like that. You could replace the preamp of the Katana with the Amster and use the solid-state power amp to give you your stage volume. So essentially, you’re changing that Katana into a little hybrid tube amp with an all-analog tube-based preamp on the front end.

So, if you're looking for a small, easy-to-use, amp simulator solution for a silent stage or for home recording. And you love the idea of keeping things as analog as possible and getting hands-on. And if you like some of the sounds you heard today, of course. Then, I would certainly recommend checking this out. That was my look at the Ampster by Carl Martin!

​Well, we’re almost at the end of the video. Thank you for sticking around. As I alluded to earlier, Carl Martin did send me the Ampster to check out and to feature in today's video. But this wasn't a paid promotion or a sponsored advertisement. No money has changed hands, all thoughts and opinions are my own, as always. If you would like to check out the Ampster, or any of their other products, I'll certainly link to the Carl Martin website in the description below. I believe you can purchase from them directly and I think they also offer worldwide shipping too. Speaking of shoutouts, I’ll also link to the Neural DSP website in the description, as well. I think they do a 14-day free trial on all of their plugins. If you're interested, check that out. If you like the video then please consider subscribing to the channel and clicking that bell icon to be notified of any future uploads, just like this one. And finally, another reminder to head over to GuitarIQ.com at your leisure, to check out some of the great books and other learning resources we have just waiting for you over there. That’s it from me. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video!