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I am fairly new to using amp simulators for guitars, I was trying to figure out the best setup I could have for practicing at home and for jamming sessions. I will list down my requirements of the setup in order.

  1. I am able to get out good sound at both lower volumes for home practice and high enough to hold it's own while playing with a drummer

  2. The sound through the speakers are not distorted by any of the setup

  3. Low latency

Based on the requirements and a little looking around the net , I was contemplating the following setup.

  1. Guitar to an audio interface like focusrite 2i2 or Behringer UM2
  2. The audio interface through the usb into the ipad/pc
  3. The audio interface through rca cables to a studio monitor like epronus 4.5

Can the above be a upgrade over my current setup of plugging in an aux cable from my ipad to an amplifier on clean channel ? Will the difference in sound be worth it to invest the extra money into all the equipments ?

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  • Good idea is subjective. Personally, I am pretty satisfied with my laptop, interface, and digital effects as a practice and recording setup but I would not be comfortable gigging with this. Dedicated hardware effects or even digital effect pedals are much more reliable than just about anything running Windows or iOS/mac OS.
    – Edward
    Dec 21, 2020 at 21:56
  • @Edward The reason I am looking into amp sims instead of digital pedal effects is because they come in much cheaper and are easier to experiment with. If you could give your views on how you think your setup were to work if you added a monitor speaker, turned up the volume and jammed in small rooms with other people, it would be very helpful here. For reference, I currently use an amp sm in my ipad , connect the guitar through an interface to it , and through an aux connect the ipad to my amplifier on clean. But at higher volumes , I notice a drastic reduce in quality of the sound
    – 95_96
    Dec 21, 2020 at 22:08
  • Since you are already using an amp sim, you should try sending your output to a full range loudspeaker, instead of a guitar amp. With an appropriate amp and speaker I could totally get my practice setup to work in a band setting. There's no technical reason why an iPad would give worse sound at high volumes (in fact I'd expect the opposite... better sound at high volumes, if the volume control is done digitally) but a guitar amp is not designed for hi-fi sound.
    – Edward
    Dec 22, 2020 at 5:59

2 Answers 2

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This kind of setup is OK for practicing at home. But IMO it's a pain to move around from place to place and it's probably about 3 too many points of failure for playing a gig and probably is not going to be anywhere near loud enough for that (or band practice). A cheap, powered PA speaker will probably get you there, volume-wise, but the reliability and convenience is still going to be an issue. For a gig, if you need a lot of effects and don't have the physical hardware, I'd look at some kind of modeling amp or else a multi-fx unit and powered PA speakers.

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Personally, I have plugged my acoustic guitar into my Focusrite 2i4 which is plugged into my Mac with a virtual amp running and then run out to both a PA System and Adam Audio T7Vs. I have had no problem with this, the latency isn't enough to disturb my playing or even notice that much. However, I have no experience with plugging an iPad into an amp but it sounds like it should work just as well.

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