Nomad Factory Rock Amp Legends

The Nomad Factory Rock Amp Legends is compatible with Mac and PC machines. But the specs are very important with this plug in because if your computer cannot handle it, it will not run smoothly. On my Macbook I had to be running Mac OSX 10.6 or higher (snow leopard). On my Windows machine Vista worked fine and so will Windows 7 both 32 and 64 bit but you will need to have at least a machine running 2GHZ and preferably 2 GB of RAM if you want it to run at its best. It will work as a VST, or RTAS for Pro Tools users.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

As long as all of the specs are good to go you will have no issues getting this plug in up and running. It did take some time on both of my machines because it is a rather large install. But once it is installed you can go right in your DAW and start working with it. I would not want to run a lot of instances of it simultaneously because it may slow down your session depending on your CPU.

OVERALL OPINION

The interface of this VST is very easy to understand there are just a lot of options/knobs to work with. This amp simulator simulates the American Rock amp models and a few British Rock Amp Models. All of the amps sound great and when they gave me so many options to work with. There is 3 band Parametric EQ's, Reverb and noise gates (attack, threshold, pre/post).

This plug in is very good for the price, but it is suppose to not use much CPU; on my system it uses more CPU than I expected it to use so I am not able to run it a bunch of times unless I track out the audio and bring it back in as a .wav file. No matter what your playing style is, there is an amp for you in this plug in.

Nomad Factory's Rock Amp Legends plug-in is a piece of amp modeling software that is available for a variety of different system. It's compatible for both PC and Mac operating systems and comes in VST, RTAS, or AU plug-in formats, covering pretty much all the bases here. The plug-in was designed by Jimmy Crespo, former member of Aerosmith and highly accomplished guitarist. I don't own this software, so I wasn't involved with installing it at all. Learning how to use this plug-in shouldn't be too difficult, as everything is laid out in a way where all the features are easily located. There are a variety of different amps that you can choose from, each with their own parameters. There's a main section of parameters located on the Marshall looking amp head in the interface that has traditional amp parameters like treble, middle, and bass EQ, presence, master volume, drive, and reverb. It then has further control over your sound with sections for a more in depth EQ, compression, a noise gate, and then effects like delay, a modulator which has settings for a chorus and a phaser, and also for tremolo. It's a pretty in depth interface in terms of what you have to play with, but everything is more or less self explanatory and I don't think that you'll need a manual unless you're a beginner.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

The studio that I work at has the Nomad Factory Rock Amp Legends plug-in installed on one of our systems. We have a number of different studios on site, and for whatever reason this is only on one of the systems in one of the mixing rooms. Usually we'll have all of the plug-ins installed on all of the systems, but I guess not too many people will use this unless it's during the mixing process. All of our systems are Pro Tools HD based, and the one in particular that it's on is a G5 desktop. Can't say we've ever had an issue running it...

OVERALL OPINION

While not my favorite amp modeling software out there, there's still a lot that you can do with the Nomad Factory Rock Amp Legends plug-in. It pretty much has all of the bases covered in terms of different features and effects, but in general I don't find all of the sounds to be totally realistic here. In general I try to get my guitar sounds from the source, but when you need to beef up a sound or do some sound fixing, amp modeling can certainly be helpful. There are a few other pieces of amp modeling software out there that I'll use before this one if I need to, but I've messed around a good amount with this one and it can certainly be useful. I like using it for more subtle changes in sound rather than trying to change the whole tone all the way around. I'd recommend checking out Softube's Amp Room plug-ins and even Digidesign's Eleven before this one, but Nomad Factory's Rock Amp Legends software is cheap enough where there's no harm at all in checking it out for yourself.