Amp Sim / NAM Input Level Accuracy Explained
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- Опубликовано: 6 июл 2024
- Make sure your setup is CORRECT for all amp sims and NAM captures.
Using the proper input levels can drastically maximise how good your amp sim reacts to your guitar
Have you ever noticed that some people get good usage out of amp sims but others think it sucks? There's a good chance they're using different interfaces with different settings and the amp sim is just reacting badly. This whole endeavour is about getting all your levels set properly so you can get the MOST out of your amp sim. Neural DSP, Softube, Mercuriall, STL Tones, Line6 Helix, Amplitube etc etc, this affects all of them.
Amp Sim Spreadsheet - docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...
Ed S RUclips Channel - / @eds4754
Ed S Reamp Measure - • How to set your Guitar...
Ed S DI Measure - • How to measure your Gu...
Join the AmpsPedalsPickups DISCORD Server - / discord
Email Questions - amps.pedals.pickups@gmail.com
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 - Overview
02:10 - Input Overview
03:50 - dBu of Amp Sim?
04:32 - dBu of Your setup?
06:06 - NAM Input Overview
09:27 - dBu with DI/Preamp?
10:09 - dBu of Reamp/Capture?
10:57 - Questions?
GEAR USED
- Balaguer Woodsman BB Lightbringer
- SOLAR 1.6A Vinter
- Gibson SG 61 Reissue
- LTD EC-1000
- Fishman Fluence Moderns
- Evertune
- RedSeven AmpCentral LoadBox
- STL Amphub
- EBS Patch Cables
- RME UCX II Interface
- Creation Audio Labs MW1 DI/Reamp
- Samson Patchbay
- Shure SM7B
- Rode Wireless Go
- Rode VideoNTG
- TC Electronic Sentry Noise Gate Pedal
If you have any gear or software demos you want me to take a look at just comment or email and I can chuck it on my list.
Thanks for watching!
- Nathan 
Видеоклипы
Really well done mate, important information!
🤜🤛 🤘
Great video, it explained things in a very clear and easy-to-understand manner. When you think about it, it's quite logical because if each manufacturer uses a different ratio between dBu and dBFS, you need to compensate/calibrate to get to the same point in terms of level. When I calibrate my input and use your capture, it's as if I connected my guitar directly into your equipment, the response will be exavtly the same in terms of gain. Even though it's logical, it's tricky to work with all these variables without a method, until Ed came along and made all the information straightforward, created videos to clarify the subject, and developed tools so that everyone can calibrate their inputs. This work was magnificent, IMO.
Yeah exactly. My real world “aha” moment was pulling up amp sims I thought were bad and needing to gain up like 12 dbu to hit the accurate point… and then I would do my typical tube screamer thing gaining it up… no way would I have “used my ears” to add 20db of gain to an amp sim to expect it work properly 🤣
It’s all very easy once you get it as well, takes no time to do the adjustment
Im shocked by how many amp sim companies dont include this info in the manual
In the audio engineering world, all this info is available on how to gain stage into the plugin/hardware in manuals and even in the product page
Its garbage you have to message them to find out like its some magic hoodoo
Like it legit makes their products worse if you dont hit amp sims correctly, its literally in their best interests and nudda nothing
It makes the problem WORSE because people have been using amp sims for 10+ years now so when they hear this input level thing they think its bro science and "why do I need to check, I've never done it before and its fine".
If the company just said what the level is we'd just use it and it wouldnt even be an issue haha. STL, Neural, Mercuriall, Nembrini and many others seem to totally get it, have from the start... they tell us what they use and its easy. Companies like IK... it seems like they've captured/modelled things at different times and used different specs so they can't even tell us what to use because it seems like they barely know themselves. You can also tell this is the case cause some amps in Amplitube5 sound fine on one setting but then you switch to like their Orange amp pack and you need to wildly gain up your setup to remotely get a good sound going. I always thought their orange amps were bad... turns out its pretty obvious they've just been captured to a much lower input spec and you need to gain the heck out of things to make it work.
Incredibly frustrating because you change from one amp to another and then it all sounds bad again. If this input spec was a well known big deal in the industry I doubt companies would do cowboy stuff like this behind closed doors. The more people treat it like common info the better we'll all be for it!
Definitely a big topic.
While I don't use amp plugins I do record DIs for ramping purposes and having to accurately match my direct guitar to amp level to my reamp level is so crucial.
Ed's videos have been gold level info and I have gone down the full multimeter route as it is so much more accurate.
Actually after doing the multimeter level match for my reamp chain I took it further to check how my levels changed when going through my effect switcher versus my guitar plugged direct into the amp.
You would be surprised the amount of attenuation an effect switcher can introduce all of which changes what guitar signal the amp finally receives.
People blame the switcher devices for introducing colouration but all it is caused by is usually just level attenuation or level increase. As soon as you adjust the out levels to match the input level the colouration is gone.
With a multimeter and a solid reference tone (that I send out of a looper pedal) you can make it all match and for me I can then truly set and forget.
I think I saw you mention the looper pedal somewhere, pretty genius haha. I’ve been using Tonocracy a lot to quickly set levels so I didn’t have to pull up something to spit out the sine wave. But before that I grabbed a test tone app on iPhone and a lightning to 3.5mm cable to 6.5 into the interface, basically let me do the same thing as the looper, I measured it once and knew where the level was at. You can really streamline the whole thing with tools like that! When I saw you did the looper pedal I was like that’s genius, just like the phone app 🤣
@@ampspedalspickups I recently mentioned it in a reply to one of Ed’s videos.
Great idea using a phone app. While I would probably keep using the looper the phone app would save me opening up a daw session and a signal generator and have to reamp and record it into my looper.
Funny that the first thing I noticed when I started this testing was that my TC Ditto+ looper at full volume wasn’t at unity with the level recorded into it. It actually adds quite a bit of gain into the signal once it is playing back. I always assumed it was at unity gain with my guitar signal.
Anyway these are all the things a reference test tone and a multimeter can tell you that your ears often can’t.
Thank you for that! I'm on an RME as well, and this helped a lot. Now, there's hardware out there running NAM, being the Dimehead NAM Player. Perhaps it makes sense to have their specs as target, so it's gonna be just plug and play for owners of that device.
Would be interesting to know what the dbu headroom of the dimehead player is, I’ll have a look around and see if I can find their numbers
I don’t think the dimehead player carries that much weight for nam honestly. Like yeah it’s a great player but long term I think many more will come and they will have the same issues, and I also see nam being incorporated into modellers as well. I think we mainly just need people and companies doing captures to do it to any kind of standard levels on their end so we know and can adjust accordingly
What would really be a great solution is to embed the reamp level into the metadata of the nam file…. Then in theory if you told the nam player (in software or hardware) what your input is… things would just auto adjust perfectly. Of course this relies on people putting the right figures on both ends but when it’s done right it would be super seamless to flick through multiple packs without worrying about changing input gain constantly
@@ampspedalspickups I agree! Sadly, there are little to no specs for the NAM player. I hope Dirk from Dimehead will enlighten us. Regarding metadata, that requires talking to Steven.
This is great! I have been testing this myself. However I want to know about microphone preamp plugins and whether we run a microphone at a lower level too and use the plugin for the gain?
I could be ignorant on the topic but I think it’s all less of a problem with mic preamp stuff. I guess conceptually it’s the same idea where they have captured or modelled the preamp behaviour to a certain dbu spec below 0dbfs but I guess the digital preamps are just adding nice saturation, it’s just less noticeable than a guitar amp reacting strangely to a guitar
Would be something cool to explore and see if those plugins have a dbu spec from the manufacturer
Hi Nathan - thank you for the video. I use a Grace M 101 as my Hi-Z guitar input, which then goes into my Lynx HiLo, and finally into my DAW (logic) wherein I use NeuralDSP plugins -- the Grace M101 preamp has gain from 10-75dB (10db being the lowest on the dial) -- so, would that mean I would need to set the inout gain in the NeuralDSP to +2.2?
It’s one notch more effort to do but we need to measure the signal basically. The more technical explanation of what’s going on is the neural amp sim is calibrated to -12.2 dbfs. When you plug straight into an interface with no preamp it’s easy to just read that input x is 13dbu or 18dbu below dbfs and you make the adjustment. But when you’ve got a preamp or di box or gain before that point you can’t really rely on specs, it just needs to be measured!
I’ll have a video up in the next day or so, easy process. Ed S on RUclips already has some out but I’ll get mine out very soon!
@@ampspedalspickups Thank you!
to check if i understand, the ssl2 interface has as data in its max instrument input 15+ db and another one that says THD +N: -8 dbfs. using Ndsp plugins let's suppose that the plugin expects an input of 13 db. should i lower 2 db according to the max input or raise 5db according to the THD?
you can ignore THD specs, that isnt relevant for this. 15dBu=0dBFS is your maximum headroom level. For NDSP, turn your interface level to 0 and set the input in the plugin to +2.8dB. DONE
@@eds4754 Hello, if I leave my level at zero, no signal will come in or the signal will be too low to record, I thought the gain would be adjusted until you reach that sweet spot (-12 in my case) and then you raise or lower the level of the ampsim according to its sweet spot.
@@eds4754How do I set up NAM with my focusrite scarlett 3rd gen? Should I set the volume knob to 0?
@@condexmeister3585 yep, definitely IMO
Thanks for the video, I'm totally at a loss with this. I use a Line6 Pod Go wireless as my audio interface for Nureal DSP plugins. I drop the input level on the Pod to roughly -50 db as this is the point where I can't here the Pod sound signal coming through and colouring the plugin. Is this correct? I'm not recording anything just using it to play through FRFR speakes. Will tbe plugin react as its meant to at that level. Thank you in advanced.
That’s a weird setup with a bunch of questions to go back and forth. Probably easier to join discord and can talk there
Sounds like there should be some DI with no pod processing coming out of the unit, shouldn’t need to gain the thing down to remove pod processing etc, it should be independent
And then you have the frfr hooked direct up to the pod?
I’m working on the next video on how to measure things with a multimeter, could be a bit simpler for this setup. When it’s a normal interface it’s easy to find the spec but I find any multi purpose thing it can be trickier cause it’s more of a guitar thing first and an interface second kind of thing… it will definitely work and we can find the spec but without having the unit on hand I’m just not sure how it all works off the top of my head
I feel dumb asking this. So I set my IK Axe I/O input 1 gain knob to 0 (lowest setting the pot-dial will go) and set my plugin accordingly to the input gain as suggested in the chart? If so that’s very straight forward. I may have made this more complicated than needed. Thanks!
That’s it!
Looking at the spreadsheet of info the axe io on 0 gain is sitting at 10.5 dbu
To hit neuraldsps spec of 12.2 you’d need to take the plugin down 1.7db and you’re good to go
If you were using stl amphub/tonehub etc that’s rated at 5.2 so you’d increase the plugin gain by 4.8 to hit that 5.2dbu spec
The best part is once you work it out once you just remember these numbers, not a constant thing to think about
@@ampspedalspickups I fully understand this now :) Makes perfect sense. I adore Ampbox Rectofire and STL AmpHub so I’ll be readjusting my built presets and see how this works out. Much much thanks!
Great video. Tonex absolutely boils my piss when it comes to gain staging. Cant get a clear answer on input gain by authors, now even worse that ik multimedia recentred the trim figure a while back.
Some captures are gold and in the zone, others have me wondering why tf anyone would upload such shite
Yeah this is “the problem” multiplied by a bad fix…. So what people reamp things at a level we don’t know and then the software tries to auto gain it by a level we also don’t know. It just makes it all hit and miss and at that point I’d rather use a modeller or my own captures where I know what’s going on
At least with the Kemper and quad cortex they have hardware units for capturing so a lot of those levels are standardised between units. Nightmare stuff
@@ampspedalspickups yep, exactly. Wondering whether it's worth the hassle
Imo tonex has only really succeeded because they paired the software with affordable pedals. When it comes to live play this stuff is a lot more forgiving. If I ever used a tonex pedal I’d have to run a separate boost pedal in front of it. I’m sure boosting the heck out of the tonex pedal wouldn’t be “accurate” but it would be usable, and I guess that’s good enough for most folks.
I’ve had a terrible time with their capturing tech. I just use nam, it’s insanely more reliable for results. Only a matter of time before nam has more and more pedals and possibly adopted into a line6 or a fractal.
Can someone please help;
I dont have a DI box atm (getting one soon) and my guitar has fishmans. When I use the 'Instrument' input on my Scarlett Solo 3rd Gen, the signal clips even when the gain is all the way down, so I have to use the line input instead.
I know that the signal will be weaker while using the line input, so should I boost the gain knob on my interface, or boost the input gain on my amp simulator to compensate for the fact that Im using line input instead of instrument input?
Any help would be greatly appreciated
You could do either but it’s generally better to leave the gain at 0 and boost in the sim. In the manual for the interface they should quote an instrument level and a line level. No doubt the line level will be a higher dBu than the instrument.
Once you get that number from the manual just check the spreadsheet for whatever ampsim you’re using and compensate inside the amp sim. So if your line level says 18dbu and the ampsim is 12dbu then inside the ampsim just gain it up by 6db
@@ampspedalspickups the Scarlett solo has 22dbu on line input, and I use Neural DSP, which on the spreadsheet says their plug-ins have 12.2dbu, so I would leave the interface gain at 0 and boost the input on the NDSP plugin itself by roughly 10db?
Thanks in advance, i really appreciate the advice
Yep that’s it!
Just remember it’s a starting point. Even though I hit nameless at 12.2 I almost always use a drive pedal on max, heavy gain and even in some cases I’ll nudge the input a bit, in your case 10 to like 11 or 12. Imagine not knowing this and not touching the gain and you’re like, why does this amp sim suck…. Cause you’re 10db off the mark 🤣. But yep 10db in neural and you’re good to go!
@@ampspedalspickups bro you are a life saver thank you so much 🙏 my six string with crappy pickups sometimes sounds a lot better than my higher end 7 string with fishman moderns and this is definitely why hahah, great video, I’ll be coming back for for, have a great day 👊
I actually tried this with my SSL 2 , left the input at 0 and recorded something but i find the di itself looks and sounds very weak, shouldn't the di itself have a decent wave form?
Can be a bit deceptive when looking at the waveforms they can look low sometimes depending on the guitar. If you join the discord it will be easier to sanity check a few things.
The spreadsheet says the ssl2+ at 0 gain is 15dbu so to hit a neuraldsp plugin you just go +3db on the gain slider.
If you were to use stl amphub or tonehub that requires 5.2dbu so you’d gain it up +10db in the ampsim
@@ampspedalspickups if the wave forms are not a problem that they look so tiny then I'm ok with that. But it might be a good idea to include it as a side note if you send your stuff to get mixed by others and you send your dis
@@constantinranis yeah definitely, I’ll include the wave form thing when I do a follow up faq video. I’ve actually already got a session showing the same riff on 6-7 guitars and the waveforms are pretty different when the interface is at the same level, it’s a good visual to see
@@ampspedalspickups but tonehub has it's own gain compensation stage does this matter ?
@@dougb3854 I could probably do a 3minute bit exploring this, but its basically 2 different approaches. The method I've got here by getting the dBu of the amp sim and matching it is arguably "perfect"... no guesswork, they give you a number, you match it, done.
Their method is to try and get you into the ballpark. If I smash some chords on my active pickup guitar they are pretty hot, they peak at a certain point. If I do the same on bareknuckle or other hot passive pickups they generally peak lower... and then one step lower if I do the same on a strat they will peak even lower. Conceptually its like... hey let me know what type of guitar are you using... smash away at it... I'll guesstimate what input dBu you're using and then I'll match that to this amp sim.
It actually works quite well even though its not "accurate". It's still a fair bit more complex than just telling someone "hey use this".
If I didnt have the dBu spec of the plugin and they had this kind of thing I'd be ok with using it. But if you have both options its kind of no question, use the spec and dont worry about the auto thing.
I still can't figure out how to do this on my interface. I'm using the hi-z input on an Audient sono. There is an input and output volume knob and if I turn any or both of these to zero I won't hear anything. So not sure how this works in my situation.
Dont worry about it, its not important. Its just easier to adjust the settings if the input level is lower. Say for example your setting the presence it will be less sensitive and easier to dial in. The whole point of these videos is they want the amp to respond as close as possible to the real amp
I had a look at the manual and yeah it’s a bit different to a typical interface. Not sure if we’re just talking about the input knob on the sono being the same as an interface gain.
I’m working on a video where you can measure the level with a multimeter so you can essentially just leave your settings as is and we can find what your levels are and go from there
Most of the time if the amp sim in your computer is reacting roughly how you’d expect then you probably aren’t far off from that specific combo of interface to amp sim input. It’s really about finding your input spec so that when you chop and change amp sims or really want to make sure you’re dialled in right on the ones you use all the time it’s spot on point
Next vid will def be worth a watch for your scenario!
Alternative is to join the discord and I’m sure we can work it all out on the sono
@@ampspedalspickups Thanks I appreciate the effort. I've been trying to figure it out for a while. Just can't wrap my head around it quite yet. I'll keep an eye out for the next video and I'll join the discord too.
You can't have a volume control on the input and the output. A volume control can only be on the output. The one on the input is a gain control. If you are turning one, or both to zero and no signal is passing through the component, you need to set them higher. Start with gain first. Gain is more important to get right because only gain can overdrive, or damage the signal. A volume control can't. Increase gain and test the results with the volume knob. Set it just high enough to where you get useable volume control, but no more. From that point, leave the gain knob alone and just use volume. You shouldn't have to play with gain again unless something in the system changes.
I have the same interface as you. Is there a reason why you choose +13dbu over +19dbu?
13dBu should have JUST enough headroom to avoid clipping so you'll get a slightly better signal to noise ratio. 19dBu is absolutely fine to use too if you prefer (and are working with loud pickups or pedals before the DI), its similar to the Axe FX level.
Most plugins these days are designed around 12-13dBu so it just makes things easier to use a level around that.
Pretty much what Ed said. But also if you wanted 19 instead of 13 I’m sure the real world mileage would be super similar results. But yeah I’ve got quiet guitars and ones with active pickups that clip internally and no problems with 13, don’t really question it it just works
How do you know whats the best level for reamping? Why choosing one level vs other?
usually you’ll want your reamp as hot as possible, and then it means you can record DI’s with a good amount of headroom and still reach unity. 12-14dBu is usually a sweet spot but it can be slightly more or less depending on the gear you are using
Generally consumer level gear will have lower output levels so that might determine how much signal you can get out of your reamp box. It also depends on the reamp box as some lose some level
@@eds4754 great response Ed, I really appreciate your help as always!
Don't boost your amp preamp, boost the ampsim input instead. To get to ur needed level, otherwise it's like using a pedal Infront of the amp.
Interesting, but I'm still not changing anything haha
Haha at least you know 🤣