Another Fly In The Ointment

09.07.2007

In anticipation of the next day’s rehearsal, I instantiated six instances of AmpliTube 2, and – instant CPU meltdown, with nasty crackles, dropouts, and glitches. Each instance was using about 20% of the CPU power, and the sound was unacceptable to say the least. Back to the drawing board.

But then I realized that the “rhythm” guitar didn’t need three separate instances, because I was going after a fairly clean, bright, chorused sound. So I removed three of the AmpliTubes from the track, created a bus, inserted one AmpliTube in the bus, and sent the three clean strings to the bus. The CPU consumption was now down to 80% – not yet acceptable, but better.

Then I went back to the “bass” AmpliTubes, turned off the cabinet emulations, and set all the preferences to minimum CPU power. I also used only two virtual stomp boxes (EQ before octave divider) per instance, and made sure all the rack effects were off. This brought the CPU power for each instance down to about 15%. Including Sonar’s chorus and EQ to give the clean guitar sound I wanted, with the three instances of AmpliTube and the Sonar effects, I hit the magic 50% figure. The bass sound was full, big, and defined, and the rhythm sound shimmered almost as well as it had when I was using the PODxt (the PODxt did have a sonic edge thanks to the amp models, but as the rhythm guitar sound is the least important part of the mix, I felt this was a compromise I could make for the sake of a simpler setup).

And there weren’t crackles, pops, or meltdowns! I was pretty sure I was on the way, and the computer setup would be ready to go for tomorrow’s rehearsal.