When you put them together you can get some good results, maybe a little bit noisy.
The important part is trying to develop a library of models for plugins to share and when paired with libraries of impulse responses and other FX you can build up common guitar tones. It's not especially user friendly, which is what you pay for with other commercial plugins
One thing that this approach (and profiling) might not be able to do is what Ben Adrian's sound design team in Line 6 did, where they've come up with some delightful "amps" in the Helix that don't have real-world equivalents. For example, my favorite, the Ventoux, which he describes like this:
"The idea was to create a “coveted boutique amp” that had a different origin story. Most coveted boutique amps come from modified black panel fenders or modified marshall circuits. I wanted to do the same thing, but base it on the early 70s Orange circuits and the mid-wattage Fender Tweed circuits."
I'm not sure how one would to that with a NN approach.
Edit: now I'm wondering if one could make a large model trained by all the amplifiers, and have it dream up amps that don't exist.
Fractal's AxeFx has been able to do that for a long time. It has a couple different Dumbles and you can tweak the modeled circuitry in a myriad of ways because it is not a profiler, but rather it models the audio impact of each component that makes up the amp.
It's still pretty unclear to me what it can and can't do.
For a few decades now it has become popular to use software or electronics to emulate classic guitar amplifiers rather than having to own all the various large and expensive (and generally tube-based) guitar amplifiers of yore.
I believe this YouTube video is showing you how to use it:
https://www.youtube.com/live/KHIORngbzJE?feature=share&t=673
Another: https://youtu.be/PjgrYB-EPbE
This guy compares an actual amp with ToneX (a commercial amp modeler) and NAM:
Before this and a paid product called Tonex came out, it cost $1500+ to “profile”/copy digitally a guitar amp. The price floor for this stuff just became $0-400 depending on what solution you go with and what gear you have.
This will be highly disruptive to the market. People can also clone paid plugins with this software and share it on Facebook. This is like when mp3s came out, but for guitar gear.
I have been on again off again doing a fairly intensive write up on this topic going into all the technical details (primarily the hardware side) complete with a fairly full featured/accurate digital recreation of the original MiniMoog VCF in PureData but it is not exactly a priority and progress on that is rather slow.
Edit: I should mention that despite the models not providing the full range of the source they still do provide a full range of their own. You still have your volume and tone controls but they operate on the model, they are not part of the model. They have gotten fairly good at faking things and the tone controls do not sound so much like post recording EQ like they did in the early modeling amps but they also do not interact with the sound like they do in the real amps where changing the bass level does not only change the bass but also affects the gain/distortion/frequency characteristics of the tubes on either side of it as well.
You can also use differentiable DSP to obtain a decent “first pass” approximation using traditional methods, and then rely on the NN to make up the difference afterward. This dramatically reduces the NN parameter count and speeds up computation. I recently tried this on an analog compressor (LA2A) and got 95%+ of the way there with a very small model.
If someone really wanted to use such technologies to be a game changer they would forget about the past and use it to design something new that exploits its strengths in a way that is natural to the musician instead of showing off its weaknesses. The potential of the technology is quite amazing and yet everyone uses it to chase nostalgia.
I'd be very interested to see your approach. So far, the most promising (non-NN) technique I've seen requires taking a symbolic inverse of a sparse matrix, which is just barely possible for a simplified pedal model.
Essentially I break down the circuit into a series of blocks which are easy to model in isolation and then show how the interactions between these blocks are very complex and difficult to model. The starting point is essentially the classic simple moog model with some extra stuff and I add in bits between those blocks to mimic the interactions while comparing it to various digital models of the filter, spice simulations and the real deal.
So I slowly make up a big massive mess of a patch in PureData that eats my entire CPU but does a fairly solid job of the emulation then try and simplify things down to show how each part affects the whole.
Except for Fractal, which models based on the component level.
It’s also not uncommon to create a capture with your pedal plugged into the amp as well. Popular for high gain heavy metal profiles to have a tube screamer in front of the amp. Stuff like the Kemper/Tonex/NAM work great with this kind of setup.
But yes, you get the sound of a specific EQ settings.
When you send through a clean signal, you measure A*B. When you get distortions, you know you’re only measuring B (because they are introduced after A). Then you derive A from that.
Playing feel on the other hand I guess is a different argument. Not sure if that is a placebo though. I do prefer the zero latency of all analog gear.
Yup, there are two main philosophies: start from a very accurate (e.g. SPICE) model and simplify it enough that it runs in real-time or start from a simple model (e.g. biquad) and add nonlinearities as required.
If you want talk more about the other approach, I just added an email in my profile. ;)
The mini VCF is not the best option for my needs but it is useful in that I have a good many implementations to use as controls as the patch advances and I can show why it all matters well enough, I can provide musical examples which most anyone will be able to hear the differences between. Ultimately I think the software folks are making the wrong sacrifices which is why pedals like the Sans-Amp series and even the somewhat naive Run Off Groove [0] DIY offerings maintain a solid following despite not sounding much like the amps they attempt to mimic, they do respond like the amps, they maintain the dynamics or at least something close enough.
I am not sure we will have much to talk about but I will give you an email when I am back on the computer.