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Something rather colourful seems to be happening at IK Multimedia of late. Not just in terms of sound, but also graphic design.

Out have gone the rather harsh looking interfaces, knocked aside by smoother, softer and generally nicer anti-aliased screen designs. Such is the case with AmpliTube 2. In fact, so radical is the visual makeover that even die-hard AmpliTube fans would be hard-pushed to recognise the new incarnation of this premier guitar amp simulation package.

So what else is new? Here’s a brief specification summary: 14 preamps, 14 EQ types, seven power amps, 16 cabinets, six microphones, 21 stomp effects and 11 rack effects. Quite a lot to contend with then! What’s interesting about AmpliTube is the way in which you can select the types of preamp, EQ, and power amp independently from each other, instead of them being fixed into a single-amp design as in other software. IK Multimedia point out that – with the 16 cabinet designs – this provides over 20,000 different amplifier combinations. While not all of these combinations will necessarily be particularly unique or interesting, it does illustrate the tremendous degree of flexibility that AmpliTube 2 provides.

Modules

The new tuner, and the separation of amp and cabinet into different modules, brings the number of sound module sections in AmpliTube 2 to five (Tuner, Stomps, Amps, Cabs, FX).Did we say five? Actually, it’s sort of nine, really, since AmpliTube 2 has a ‘split’ facility that doubles up the last four sections, and enables them to be routed in a number of versatile ways to create some amazing sounds.

It’s true that Native Instruments’ Guitar Rig has had splitting capabilities from the outset, but IK Multimedia’s implementation of splits within AmpliTube 2 is much more tightly controlled and less likely to get you tangled up in knots of arcane virtual signal routing. If you want more layers to your sound than this system allows, you can always load up another instance of AmpliTube in a different channel of your host sequencer. In practice, there’s usually more than enough within a single instance of AmpliTube 2 to give you whatever kind of guitar sound you need.

On the stomp-box side of things you get five modulation pedals, two delays, three filter pedals (including wah-wah), three pitch pedals, four distortion pedals, two compressors, an EQ and a volume pedal. These all sound as good as they look, although it has to be said that the graphical display of the volume and wah pedals leaves a little to be desired – you can’t easily tell the positions of the pedals just by looking at them.

The other quirk that’s slightly annoying is the way that the routing of the splits works. Instead of clicking on the relevant part of the routing to change it, you have to choose from one of eight different routing presets. Since there’s no intuitive way of knowing in advance what each preset is, some experimentation is required.