Let’s dig into the best plugins your guitar or bass could ever wish for.

20 years of research and development has gone into making Amplitube the standard when it comes to amp modelling and software based guitar tone. They’ve modelled over 400 pieces of gear including amps, cabs, speakers, mics, rack and stomp box effects to give you an unparalleled range of tonal options. You can pretty much wire up any rig you could possibly imagine and save it as a preset.

IK uses Dynamic Interaction Modelling to capture every squeak from every piece of gear and version 5 brings in their Volumentric Impulse Response engine to capture over 600 distinct impulse responses per speaker. What does this mean? It means that the sound that comes out the other end of Amplitube is as authentic and genuine as you’re going to get.

You have amps from 7 decades of guitar playing including Fender, Leslie, Orange, Marshall, Vox, ENGL and Roland. You have a mix of official brand endorsed models and IK Multimedia’s own take on classics of both guitar and bass origins. You can of course mix and match amp heads and speaker cabinets from all sorts of eras and genres for that perfect sound.

Amplitube 5 also comes with a Tuner, a Super Looper for instant overdubs and an 8-track studio for recording yourself or your band directly onto your computer.

Amplitube is an incredible tool and you can even start with the free Custom Shop version and a handful of amps and upgrade as you need more or your tastes change.

Street Price: $179
ikmultimedia.com

Where other emulations want to give you every tone on the planet Softube prefer to focus on the classics. Every amp, cabinet and effect in Amp Room has been carefully chosen to give you the best possible tone from the greatest gear in existance. Softube has been modelling analogue gear for a long time and Amp Room has an effortless fell about it.

This plugin has been designed in collaboration with Marshall, Tube-Tech, Solid State Logic, Chandler Limited, Empirical Labs, Trident, Weiss Engineering and more using decades of experience and the same approach they employ when modelling classic gear from Abbey Road that was used by the Beatles. This is serious stuff.

You can create a professional workflow that suits your needs with as many serial and parallel signal paths as you want with splits through different amps and effects that all wind up perfectly mixed at the end. This is not just stomp boxes but studio quality high-end processors and console emulations that you would use in a DAW.

One recent development is that when Softube produce a new effect plugin they tend to release an Amp Room version of it so you can run a very diverse range of possiblities from synth emulations and rack effects that you wouldn’t expect to find.

Amp Room doesn’t have the breadth of choice that some others do but this is the choice of the connoisseur.

Street Price: $199
softube.com

Guitar Rig brings together all the gear you could ever need in a remarkably compact and easy to navigate interface. Rather than feeling the need to emulate the look of every piece of gear Native Instruments builds just enough feel into a scrollable rack into which everything fits. You still get the right vibe though and it makes for a very consistent experience.

The realism is brought to you by the Intelligent Circuit Modelling technology. It uses machine learning to emulate the behaviour of circuits and hardware devices so it doesn’t just sound like it, it feels like it.

Version 6 already have pretty much everything you’d expect from an amp simulator but version 7 brought in some super high-gain amps, a classic 60s Reverb amp, an AC Box 60s tube amp and an iconic Bass Rage. They know what they are even if the names don’t quite match up. In the effects department we got some tape wobble, noise machines, vibrato and a whole rack of fuzz, screamers, chainsaws and stuff.

The cabinet section has been improved with a new Impulse Response Loader so you can load up any impulse responses of your favourite gear. And an additional side bar in the interface will help you visualise and patch everything together exactly how you want it.

Guitar Rig is a modern take on the world of guitar tone and it feels like you are taking yourself into a very bright future.

Street Price: $199
native-instruments.com

This selection of amp models originated in the Line 6 Helix hardware multi-effects processor. Now they’ve brought those tones to the plugin format in the shape of Helix Native.

The first thing you’ll notice is that the interface is a bit boring — they call it “clear and concise.” But once you’ve got over that you’ll find the sounds are superb. The interface is just what it needs to be. As it came from hardware it wasn’t designed with a fake GUI in mind to look like an amp or effect and so with Helix Native, you just get the facts. You can see how the signal chain is working, what the parameters are set to and a good long list of presets.

In the software, you get 62 amplifiers, 104 effects, 37 cabinets, and 16 microphones so you are bound to stumble upon the sound you need for your session if you spend enough time trying them all out. Routing options are versatile and complex, and you can keep loading up the effects and signal chains until you run out of CPU power.

One nice feature is that if you do have the Helix hardware you can share user presets and sound libraries between them. So, you can put your sounds together when recording and take it with you in a hardware floorboard when you gig.

Helix Native is a lot more expensive than most of the others on this list but you do get a lot for your money and it can also work well on other instruments and other areas of the studio.

Street Price: $399
line6.com

TH-U Full contains a massive selection of models. There are 89 guitar amps, four bass amps, 50 guitar cabinets, two bass cabinets, 77 effects, and 18 microphones. It comes with over 1,000 presets that cover every conceivable musical style, and you can model in your own amps if you want.

A lot is going on in here. Once you’ve spent a few weeks in the presets, you could consider running impulses through your hardware rig to capture the response and use it as a software preset — that’s nuts! The Rig Player technology lets you sample any hardware and reproduce every nuance. If that amp is not sounding quite right, then get in there and change the tube; there’s an almost limitless combination of tubes, letting you forge your unique tone.

If microphone placement is your thing, then you can place it in any 3D space in front or behind the cabinet in TH-U Full. Their ReSPiRe technology lets you choose between the real response of the cabinet or a specially processed one that is optimized to fit in your mix.

This thing has a crazy amount of depth, more amps and effects than anything, looks fabulous and has a built-in multitrack looper for when you find the time to play your guitar. It’s an extraordinary piece of software for people who love the detail and minutia of crafting tones.

Street Price: $269
overloud.com

Positive Grid says that this will turn your computer into an all-in-one guitar powerhouse while remaining simple and intuitive. There are three versions: the top Elite version has 100 amps and 100 stomp and rack effects. It can download thousands of more effect pedals from their online community, and you create your own and share those with the world. So, it’s pretty comprehensive and yet manages to have an engaging and straightforward interface.

You can build everything from acoustic to high-gain amplifier rigs with full control over microphone placement. The cabinets are provided by officially endorsed Celestion Impulse Responses. Or you can bring in impulses from elsewhere. Then you build your pedal board or download one from the community.

But there’s one standout feature that needs attention: the Guitar Match. It analyses your guitar and then transforms it into any one of 18 legendary guitars. It’s an extraordinary thing. Your clapped-out old electric could sound like a Les Paul or Telecaster at the touch of a button.

Despite the size and scope of BIAS FX2, it somehow manages to hold it all together better than TH-U Full. The interface is less fussy, and some of the effects are beautifully rendered. There’s an awful lot of good stuff in here.

Street Price: $99 up to $299
positivegrid.com

Waves are the Grand-daddy of plugin makers with a huge roster of effects and signal processing. Their guitar-based offering is called GTR3, has been around a while and contains 4 separate plugins.

GTR3 Amps is inspired by the usual suspects of Fender, Marshall, Mesa/Boogie, Vox and more, giving you 25 modelled guitar amps and 7 bass amps. With its simple amp-head interface, you get to pick the amp type, up to 2 cabinets and two microphones. Each amp has Drive, Pan, Phase switch and Delay controls, and these are standardized regardless of which amp you start with. The whole thing is simplified and obvious, giving you an easy way into the tones without having to learn how to be an Engineer.

GTR3 Stomps is where you’ll find your stomp-box effects. There are 26 models bundled in here covering all the distortion, delay, phasing and fuzz you could want. You can load up to 6 in the rack.

GTR3 Tuner is…. a tuner, which is useful.

GTR3 Toolbox brings it all together in a standalone version that can load up to 2 GTR3 Amps, 6 GTR3 Stomps and the tuner in one piece of software. You can get stuck into the microphone settings and start to craft your sound much deeper than in the individual plugins.

Waves plugins always sound great, and the GTR3 models are no exception. It lacks the pizazz of some of the others, opting for solid, usable sounds that are simple to use, leaving you to get on with the playing.

Street Price: Waves GTR3 – $129 but usually on sale for around $49, which makes this fantastic value.
waves.com

Neural DSP decided to build a guitar plugin with innovative and explorative guitarist Plini. His style of playing moves from progressive to fusion and all sorts of metal and cinematic sounds. What they came up with is beautiful, simple and inspirational.

You begin with three amplifiers; Clean, Crunch and Lead. The Clean is light and elusively crystal clear. The Crunch feels crisp and bold for just the right amount of drive. Lead is a hot-rod heading for hell through the heaviest riffs and fattest triode gain stage. From there, you have a Compressor and Overdrive to fill in the saturation and bring up those quieter sounds until they melt your face off. You can then play with the 9-band graphic EQ for a bit of nuance. For time-based effects, we have a beautifully huge Reverb and a digital delay with machine-learned tape saturation.

At the end of the tone, we have an impulse-based cabinet sim that features six microphones for the perfect capture. You can add your own favourite impulse response files for the perfect sense of space and tone.

Archetype Plini is very simple, which is definitely to its advantage. It feels like it works like a guitarist works, not with endless choices but with carefully curated options that give you exactly what you need.

Street Price: $119
NeuralDSP.com

All street prices listed at the time of writing.