Each amp comes with a specially selected set of cabinet and mic emulations, and in Paradise, you can use any amp with any set of mics and cabs. Do you want to pair the Fender Twin Reverb with a 4×12 Marshall cabinet powered by two SM57s? Go for it.
You can have up to 10 effects units, five in front of the amp and five after it.
The tone is amazing. The UA 1176 is famous for emulating compressors, tape delays and Lexicon reverb units, and all that gear is heaven sent. (Some controls have been simplified, but this appears to be a “full-fat” version of these devices under the hood.) Also, each amp allows you to control the amount of “room tone” captured by the mic, and the room simulation is very impressive.
Heaven, at least for me, is the best place to provide options without excess. You can apply five before effects and five after effects to the amp and cab. The interface is big and clear, with chunky buttons and knobs, and setting up a new pedalboard and dialing in a tone is simple. It doesn’t hurt that Paradise comes with several hundred presets, which are really great.
While I think Paradise, Polychrome DSP, and NeuralDSP are all ahead of products like Amplitube in terms of sound quality, they really win out by being more fun to use. AmpliTube is a mix of a bazillion amps and effects that you can arrange into complex routing chains: splitting the signal, running a DI, steering a virtual mic near the virtual speaker cone, selecting room tone, and twisting a bazillion almost unintelligible knobs. it’s too much. At some point, all options work against creativity.
I created two short demos in Paradise in a few hours, just to show what kind of sounds are available here. (You can listen below.) One uses a lot of ’80s-style rock tones, while the other shows off some edge-of-the-breakup tones on Dumb. No fancy gear was used, just a cheap PRS guitar and a generic Craigslist bass plugged directly into an audio interface in my office.
Rock ‘n Roll will never die! (Unless I kill it). [above]
Breakup tone from dumb amp sim. [above]
negative side? Well, like many UA products, Paradise is expensive. The “starting price” is $149, although there is a loyalty offer for anyone with a previous UA Amp SIM. Considering that both the NeuralDSP and Polychrome DSP were only 50 percent off in the sale, and the Amplitube is practically being given away at this point, you might be spending more on the Paradise. Still, you get a lot for that money, and Patience will likely find Paradise on major sales within the next year.
<a href