Distorted guitars now hold their notes
Distorted and overdriven guitars now sustain the way a real high-gain amp does: chords and lead notes stay at full strength instead of fading. In blind listening it beat the old sound on rhythm parts and solos alike.
A real high-gain amp is pushed so hard that a chord stays at full strength until the next one is played. Ours wasn't: chords and long lead notes faded almost as fast as the bare string does, which made distorted guitars sound thin and a little tame.
What changed
- The amp behind distorted and overdriven guitars has far more gain. Power chords stay full until the next chord, and lead notes sing for as long as they're held.
- The tone and the loudness are the same as before, so your mixes keep their balance.
- Palm-muted notes are shorter, so fast riffs stay clear instead of running together, and the sound between them is drier. A faint echo that the new gain would have turned into reverb is gone from these guitars.
How we chose it
We compared the old and new sound blind, on the same bars, without knowing which was which. The new one was preferred on power chords, palm-muted riffs, overdriven rhythm and both kinds of solo, and was judged closer to Guitar Pro on most of the bars where we had its version to compare. We also tried neural copies of two real amps. They did no better than simply giving our own amp the gain a real one has.
Clean and acoustic guitars, bass and drums sound as they did.