Softube plugins - way too much hassle, or am I just a luddite?

After a few years of not playing guitar, and now living somewhere where I can't make a lot of noise without upsetting people, I thought I'd finally go the digital route so that I can play through headphones on my PC.  I bought a Universal Volt and Neural DSP's Archetype Nolly and I love it. Hours and hours of fun. I now wish I'd done it years ago. 

Anyway, I saw that Softube do a Marshall suite. I liked the thought of having digital copies of some of my favourite amps and cabs, so I downloaded a trial.  Oh, shit, it doesn't work without installing a DAW. So I've got to install/buy another piece of software too. OK, so I download a Cubase trial. And f*ck me, what a lot of sh*t there is to learn. I have absolutely zero desire to learn any of it. I don't want to record music - I just want to play my guitar. After rolling my eyes I spent some time getting it set up with the Volt, importing the plugins and so on, everything looking as it should be (signal clearly moving up and down on the screen etc.) but still no sound, I thought 'f*ck this, I'm way, way to busy to figure all this out' and binned it.

Is there no way to just play the Softube stuff with zero aggravation, the same as the Neural DSP suites? 

There are plenty of standalone amp sims for the PC or Mac

I've used

Guitar Rig
Amplitube - probably the best of these, loads of marshall amps

GTR3 (older)

Holy cow there's a lot of gear in Amplitube Max for less than £100!!! Does it all sound authentic? I wish I'd come across that before Neural now.

I've found the Softube Marshall suite to be simultaneously amazing and a right royal PITA.

There's no standalone but you can try using a free VST host like Cantabile Lite. That being said my amp suite crashed frequently when I did that so I've gone back to Reaper which I shamefully still haven't paid for. There's a bit of a learning curve there but tbh once you've got your Softube project saved it's easy to fire it up each time, worth the effort.

One thing with that plugin, and I use the Volt too, you need to crank the input gain to its max to get the amps sounding accurate. Or do it on the interface, but adding 12db in the plugin is bang on. I ignored the cabs at first in favour of IRs but they're great too once you start messing around with the mics. Worth persevering with IMO, all of those amps are cracking once you're up and running and gain staged correctly.

Neural Amp Modeller might be worth checking out, that has a stand alone app and an archive of free captures, but it's a total crap shoot as to if any of them are any good. Easy to get up and running though.

bananaman said:

After a few years of not playing guitar, and now living somewhere where I can't make a lot of noise without upsetting people, I thought I'd finally go the digital route so that I can play through headphones on my PC.  I bought a Universal Volt and Neural DSP's Archetype Nolly and I love it. Hours and hours of fun. I now wish I'd done it years ago. 

Anyway, I saw that Softube do a Marshall suite. I liked the thought of having digital copies of some of my favourite amps and cabs, so I downloaded a trial.  Oh, shit, it doesn't work without installing a DAW. So I've got to install/buy another piece of software too. OK, so I download a Cubase trial. And f*ck me, what a lot of sh*t there is to learn. I have absolutely zero desire to learn any of it. I don't want to record music - I just want to play my guitar. After rolling my eyes I spent some time getting it set up with the Volt, importing the plugins and so on, everything looking as it should be (signal clearly moving up and down on the screen etc.) but still no sound, I thought 'f*ck this, I'm way, way to busy to figure all this out' and binned it.

Is there no way to just play the Softube stuff with zero aggravation, the same as the Neural DSP suites? 

You could just download a VST host to run plugins rather than a full DAW.  A quick Google suggests Cantabile Lite as a good option, which is free.

Edit: Yocky got there first

Amplitube max is ace. 

I use a Nux Mightyplug for headphone playing, rechargeable, simple phone app to tinker with the sounds ... plus I can walk around while playing too.

Amplitube. You get all the effects, plus cabs, mics, rooms, etc. Lots of fun to be had for £100!

victorludorum said:

Amplitube. You get all the effects, plus cabs, mics, rooms, etc. Lots of fun to be had for £100!

I think you get the tonex max free also

i have installed and uninstalled vintage amp room several times, and still can't find the .dll file in any folder!