line 6 pod xt live or native instruments guitarrig

[ggmmss]

just looking for opinions i have an mbox and a room too small for miking an amp. i am trying to decide between guitar rig and pod xt live. i play mostly nu-metal type music so i need a great mesa boogie model.

[jazzmandan]

My take is that the POD is the gold standard of amp simulation. I use my POD II for all PT recording. The POD tone software actually runs simultaneously with PT 6.4.

I just read on article in the December edition of Guitarist on the POD XT Live. The unit is somewhat intimidating. Their conclusion, "...based on the great price and huge seleciton of tones, we rekon the only thing stopping all guitarists from getting hold of one of these is FEAR".

Jazzmandan

[RolandK]

I'd go with the Pod because its hardware. You can use it anywhere and don't have to worry about computer updates and all that crap. YMMV of course.

[Cliffy_Boy]

The POD XT with the new firmware version 2 or the Vox Tonelab are the best modellers in existence. Software would be NI Guitar Rig. But nothing beats the Mesa Dual Rectifier on the Vox. The Pod is a very close second. Plus with a hardware modeller you can use it alone. But reamping is difficult.

[powerjoe]

I too have heard nothing but great things about the POD Xt live. It sounds like a great piece of gear. Right now, I am using Amplitube SE (full version) and the latest NI Guitar Rig models and I love both. My music is hard core metal like Meshuggah, Anthrax - Metallica - Mushroom Head etc... you name it and I need a really big sound. I use Amplitube (much to many others dismay) and have found it to be a great plug in albeit a CPU hog when used in multiple instance. All of my basic rythmn tracks are done using Amplitube (7string and 6 string configurations and differing voicings for punch and all around hugeness) but NI Guitar rig gets my vote for lead stuff and coool neo-metal effects. It's just a rock solid plug in. It has an amp model called the "Gratifier" which is modeled after the Rectifier series Mesa amps. It is powerful. When adding additional gain stages in GR, I have found it to get a bit noisy. (This is probably operator error though). In Amplitube, I can squeeze very serious gain out of the model and still not have much if any noise. The Gate on the Amplitube and GR models are great. Turn the gate off when you want to use a low voulme knob setting however to get that less driven pickup sound.

I have toyed with the idea of getting the POD XT Live as well, but right now both of the aforementioned plugins (demo versions available at their respective websites) work very, very well for what I am doing.

I hope this helps.

Amplitube Site (http://amplitube.com/) and Native Instruments' Guitar Rig Site (http://www.nativeinstruments.de/index.php?guitarrig_us)