Hey All,
What do you guys recommend for a guitar learner who is interested in guitar effects and wants to start learning different effects and using them while playing songs. I saw the Boss G1x and the Sonicake Matribox and both looked decent to me with the vast tonal possibilities they offer…Or would you rather suggest investing in Audio Interafces/ DAW software and go the software route for learning effects ?
Would love any recommendations/feedback as I am fairly new to this world 
Thanks!
Its huge there are so many options.
As to which way you go depends on how you think you’ll play guitar.
Using an AI + monitors/headphones is great and gives you a lot of flexibility in sounds/software.
This is what I mostly use, with NeuralDSP plugins, Bias FX2, Neural Amp Modeler etc
Choices here are pretty much endless.
Then you have a bunch of FX / amp sim pedals/boxes, again almost limitless, some are just amp sims some are full fx etc. From the katana go to the Quad cortex , kemper etc.
Then you have modeling amps, best (wrt above) if you want to hear/gig and not need something else. Often with pretty much every effect built in.
And obviously there are traditional amps with pedal boards.
My personal feeling is that it is hard to beat dedicated guitar hardware. You don’t need to dig into details of getting the audio interface to work without latency, buy that extra plug-in, and fiddle with your laptop just to play.
I have dedicated hardware - an amp and cabinet. I use this most of the time. I did buy an effects processor because it was far cheaper than buying pedals once I added up what I thought I’d want to experiment with.
I also use Garage Band on my laptop using a very cheap A/D converter cable. the cable is maybe $30USD. I can play with effects and record, but it is a bit more trouble than just sitting down and playing like I can with the processor. You also need to have a laptop and the software available to you whenever you want to play. This is a bit messy to me, but is it portable.
You did not mention what operating system you use. Garage Band is distributed with AppleOS. There are similar things on Windows and on Linux. Windows options will often cost money.
I have a Sonicake Matribox and I can honestly say that it easily meets my needs and some! For what they cost they’re an absolute bargain. For someone starting out with this game it’s a no brainer, in the big scheme of things it’s fairly simple, that’s a big benefit in my mind. To me as always if it sounds good it is good, and for my purposes it definitely does.
The other benefit is that it will go straight into your computer or whatever, it only needs the correct interface adapter (cable). Also you can use it with headphones, it has speaker cab emulation.
The software route and hardware route are both decent options. Although some of the cheaper hardware options are very fiddly.
It really depends how you play, how comfortable you are with PC/Mac tech and what you have already.
You haven’t mentioned if you have an amp already?
I think this is a really tricky subject and it’s something I wrestle with too.
In some ways a cheap multi fx unit isn’t a bad way to go as long as you accept you probably will end up replacing it eventually. It gives you the possibility of trying a lot of different sounds for not a great deal of money while you find your direction.
I can’t really speak about software as I’ve chosen not to take that path. I don’t want to have to have my laptop on to just pick up my guitar for a few minutes and I want to be playing my guitar not tinkering with my laptop. I’m sure fans of this setup will say I’m wrong, this is just a choice I’ve made, I’m not saying it’s not right for other people or that it’s bad or anything like that.
I think in the end I’ll be going traditional with an amp and a small pedalboard. Clearly this setup can be as complicated and time consuming as any other (and probably more expensive if you allow yourself to buy endless pedals).
It’s a complicated choice for sure because all paths have pros and cons and there’s an element of trying to guess your own future direction because that’s a big factor. Good luck!
Do your homework and leverage the best of all worlds. These are just tools on your tone toolbelt. Get a decent amp with plenty of FX options, including cab and virtual FX. Find a decent DAW that provides plenty of great options (I really like Garageband). Pedals are fun and can be had affordably on Amazon. This is the golden age of guitar so have at it. Why limit yourself?
I can offer my perspective as someone who went the software route. I’m just a beginner though and definitely do not have professional experience; everything here is based on my impression of the state of things as I had the same question some time ago.
The software route is not free. You need an audio interface and possibly a MIDI foot controller. Also, there are many non-free plugins out there. I’ve only used the open-source stuff myself, since I’m on linux, so I can’t give you any advise if the paid-for plugins are worth their price.
Be prepared to put in a fair amount of effort in setting things up. You’ll need to learn how to use an audio interface, a DAW (no need for the complicated stuff yet, just figure out how to route audio and run plugins in it), and possibly MIDI if you want a foot controller to control / toggle plugin effects (again, you don’t need the complicated MIDI stuff at this stage; simply binding MIDI messages to buttons in your DAW should be enough for now). This is a one-off effort though.
Despite what you read online, my general opinion is that latency is no longer an issue. Modern computers are insanely powerful; the computational burden of audio processing at 48 or even 96 kHz is actually very low compared to the capabilities of modern processors. Keep in mind that 10 ms is the time sound takes to travel 3.43 meters; i.e. 10 ms latency on your computer is like standing 3.43 meters away from an analogue amp (assuming that the amp itself has zero latency). Have you heard anyone saying they can’t practice / perform if they’re further than 3.43 m from the amp? I know I haven’t.
You get access to a state-of-the-art amp modeller. The free and open-source “Neural Amp Modeler” (NAM) is widely regarded as the best amp simulator regardless of price. There are also tons of free amp captures for NAM, and even more paid-for amp capture packs.
You can easily record both the dry (i.e. the signal straight out of the guitar) and wet (the signal after all your effects) signal in your DAW. This allows you to test out different effects after the fact. This is not possible with most multi-effect pedals (an exception: the boss ME-90 multi-effects pedal does allow you to record both dry and wet signals via the USB audio interface).
In short, I would probably go for the software route if:
You want to record.
You like tinkering. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of plugins out there for you to play with to find your sound. Even better, you can do all that tinkering in post-processing (i.e. you record the dry signal and apply the effects after).
You need a complicated MIDI setup for other stuff (e.g. you’re in a band and you have a synthesiser that you’re using MIDI to control). You can buy programmable MIDI controllers, but those are quite expensive. Much easier IMO to use a computer to control MIDI.
I might want to stick to multi-effects pedals if:
You want to gig with it. I don’t think you would want to use your daily driver laptop and pray that the latest OS update didn’t introduce some new showstopper bug. If you’re going to use it professionally, I think you would probably want a separate computer that you use solely for audio. You could use something like the mac mini for that. But of course, that’s not as easy as just getting a multi-effects pedal.
You want technical support.
I don’t think it’s a question of limiting yourself but more of a question of where to start. You can certainly mix and match options or change course later but it’s probably best to focus on one at a time
While this is true, the latency is coming more from buffer size. Keeping the buffer small (tiny?) keeps latency acceptable. If you buffer 100ms of audio, you have already doomed your latency to be >100ms. Capturing shorter buffers is the answer there, but you can miss a buffer if the computer gets overly busy for some reason. You can hear both problems, and this is balance digital audio is fighting – just enough buffer to capture everything without hearing noticeable delay.
This only matters in a stadium setting - I have never seen one band member separate from the others by enough distance to make this troublesome. This has nothing to do with the latency noticed in a DAW.
There was a post by someone here once that was part of a big simultaneous play event. I bet they noticed latency from distance trying to play with a bunch of people spread out over a big field, but that is a special case.
Also, the buffer latency is just one aspect. The latency of processing audio in plugins is on top of this, and the full round-trip latency includes the latency of the AI itself which, although small, is significant.
The only way to know your real baseline monitoring latency is to loop an output to an input and run a test.
Some DAWs include latency testing and calibration:
Modern hardware multifx systems have monitoring latencies of under 10ms, which is better than most PCs with plugins, even when tuned for low-latency. Some, like the Boss GT-1000, have ultra low latency that is under 1ms
https://www.thegearpage.net/board/index.php?threads/modelers-latency-chart.2453429/
Whether or not you are happy with (or even really notice) this latency is a personal thing. I’m fairly sensitive to it and can feel it when playing with amp plugins via my PC, even with the buffer latency set to around 5ms.
But I guess I’m fairly sensitive to latency (I guess bell ringing has something to do with that).
For me that’s useable but I, personally, prefer a hardware unit as they always feel more responsive to me.
Also I prefer to not to have barriers to practice and, for me, having to deal with setting up a computer, load an application, etc. is such a barrier, even if it only takes a few minutes.
Cheers,
Keith
I connect the guitar cable to my guitar and run up the amp sim of choice, literally 2 seconds.
I’m not locked into 1 product, 1 amp sim etc
1ms, 10ms, 30ms you are not going to notice the difference
If you are next to the computer, and if it’s switched on, and not gone to screen saver, etc. (and are super fast).
Whilst I do have a guitar near my PC, I rarely use it. I mostly practice in another room and have to find my laptop and a power cable and set it up if I want to use it there. That often means I have to boot it up or, at least, wake it up from a sleep state, log in, possibly deal with updates, and try to not get distracted with email and chat alerts, load the application and select the patches I want.
That’s “only” a few minutes in reality, but that’s a few minutes more than turning on the power to my amp or modeller and waiting for the 1-2 seconds for it to start, and it is a barrier to getting into the mindset for practicing. If I had to do it every time I practice, rather than the handful of times I want to use a laptop for recording or Tutorials, I would practice a lot less.
I suspect many other people are in a similar position to me.
YMMV
YOU may not. I certainly can!
In listening tests I did recently, with rounds of computer simulated bells rung evenly 250ms apart, I can tell when around 10ms of error is added between two of the bells
And most people can hear, or “feel” 30ms of latency. 30ms was considered to be the maximum latency you can expect people to experience on a phone call before it starts to becomes difficult to talk without echo cancellation.
On a guitar, I feel the slight lag between picking and the sound coming out. It is very tiny, and it won’t bother most people, and it’s a feeling rather than a plainly audible thing. But it is noticeable if the latency is higher, even if it’s perfectly usable. Especially when using headphones.
Cheers,
Keith
Just giving MY impressions and use mate. Sorry you cant cope with it.
And I’m going by my experience and use which is not atypical.
We are not all the same as you. I’m sorry that you don’t seem to be able to appreciate that or cope with it.
Keith
Yes I read somewhere that the threshold at which latency in voice is noticable to humans is about 15 ms. But the critical thing is this: this is true only for voice, because we are so used to hearing our own voice. This is not the case for instruments.
(To be clear, this is a completely separate point from #1.) Let me hypothesise: you’re listening to the processed audio in a way that allows you to hear the guitar (e.g. non-isolating headphones or speakers), right? If not, ignore this whole paragraph. I suspect the reason you might find yourself so sensitive to latency is because you’re hearing the slight time difference between the twang of the strings from the electric guitar and the processed audio. Human hearing is quite good at resolving separate pulses, possibly even down to single digit microseconds. Try using some method that isolates background noise, e.g. in-ear monitors or noise cancelling headphones. I’ve tried this myself; when using in-ear monitors I really can’t tell even if the latency is as high as 30–50 ms.
Let me know if you try out #2. I’m curious to see if someone else experiences the same thing.
Yes, I suspect this is a large part of it. I’m playing at quite low levels and my headphones are not entirely isolating. Also, thinking back (as I’ve not done it for a long time), I could hear it pretty obviously when using speakers too where I can definitely hear the guitar string twang.
Incidentally, my main PC audio Interface is actually a mixer (Behringer XR18) which includes a bunch of hardware effects including some basic, but flexible amps sims (based on the Sans Amp) which I have permanently dialled in so I can play my guitar through the PC speakers without involving the PC or plugins (in theory the PC doesn’t need to even be on).
I can clearly hear the immediacy of that compared to using plugins on the PC. Again, this is probably because I can hear the strings.
I’m sure if I was playing at stadium volumes, I wouldn’t notice as much.
Cheers,
Keith
imho, just get a few regular (common ones, delay, tremolo, overdrive etc.) pedals for the amp your using now.
I did it this way over maybe 2 years to acquire 5-6 pedals (several of them I got used, 2 were new). 4 of them I use. I also got cheap joyo pedals mostly so my investment isn’t to big. Turns out the cheap joyo pedals work just fine for my home playing so was glad I went that route.
I like to plug and play w/o spending much time adjusting this or that. I also ain’t keen on spending time to figure out how to use my gear. Any of the pedals I ended up with ya really don’t need a book to learn how to use them. They are intuitive for use. This is a win for me.
Good luck in your adventure.
By the way I found this. It’s far from scientific, but they say:
While we can’t generally hear the effects of latency until they are around 15-30 milliseconds (ms), performers can begin to feel them at around 5-10ms. At 7ms, latency starts to mess with our ability to play or sing on top of or behind the beat. Sound starts to feel sluggish at 10ms.
Cheers,
Keith
Since a vocalist will hear their voice through their sinus cavities and bones, they might be able to notice that their monitored signal arrives just slightly later than their sung notes.
Interesting. I don’t know… I can believe that humans can tell if 2 pulses are more than (say) 7 ms apart, which would be the case of you hearing the time difference between the twang of the string and the processed sound, as well as the case of the singer hearing the delay between their own voice and the processed sound. But I’m not sure I can believe that:
At 7ms, latency starts to mess with our ability to play or sing on top of or behind the beat.
Imagine you have a drummer and an acoustic guitarist, standing 1.2m apart. Let’s say the guitarist plays to the rhythm provided by the drums. Now, at 1.2m, the sound of the drums will take 3.5ms to reach the guitarist, and assuming he plays perfectly on time, he will play a note that would reach the drummer 7ms after the drummer’s beat. By that logic, no drummer will ever hear the band playing properly if they stand more than 1.2m away from him… Really?