Building a Live Rig With AmpliTube 5 Brian May

Restrictions were drastically lifted here meaning that I've had to start preparing to perform live again. I've been spoiled with AmpliTube 5 at home and now I want to bring it on to the stage!

I usually gig with a Line 6 Helix which is a great unit. The Brian May sounds from AmpliTube are much better but bringing a computer on stage is a challenge.

With the Helix, I monitor in mono with a Yamaha DXR 10. If I'm lucky, I'll have two of these for stereo but the front of house desk always gets a stereo feed. The interface used is IK Multimedia's AXE I/O

My first challenge was to get a preset to work loud. When you make sounds for recording, they don't necessarily translate well into higher volumes. This is down to a factor called the Fletcher Munson effect. Perceived sound does not amplify evenly meaning bass and high frequencies can become over pronounced at higher volumes.

Another issue is having a summed signal for my monitor but keeping a stereo signal for the front of house. I solved this by using Mainstage for Mac. I am assigning the main outs of my AXE I/O into a gain plugin that sums AmpliTube into Mono for those while outputs 3/4 will be still stereo.

This also means that the master out control can change the volume of my monitor without influencing the sound engineer's mix.

I risked the ire of my neighbours and cranked the monitor with the new live adjusted preset, and it sounds perfect.

The guitar interacts with the speaker like a real amp too meaning that feedback is easy.

Next step is controlling the sounds with a midi pedal. This is actually very easy but one thing I will sorely miss from the Helix is patch names and a foot tuner. If anyone has any recommendations for a midi controller that can solve these problems I'd love to hear it!

[ArloTarr]

Yeah that sounds great! I’ll be checking out more of your videos. Cheers

[taskbar]

No one gonna talk about how smooth the transition to clean was in 0:40 props to the yonderbosk pickups.

[tozguitar]

I'm using it at home and it sounds fantastic. I'd love to use it live but I'd be a bit anxious about something going wrong.

[lcmusicbr]

Great tone, man! Is Amplitube reliable live? How is your experience with this setup by now, since this video is from 2021? Congratulations for the nice tone and playing!

[danielcotton]

Sounds incredible mate. I've got the headrush frfr108 and hoping to use that live with the melo audio midi commander which seems to be doing the job, what you planning on using? Be amazing to see someone using Amplitube live, would love to hear that. I can see a trip to Ireland on the cards 👌🍺

[rec-n-play]

Hello from Belgium, great video, I'll subscribe and check out the next ones !!!
I work as sound engineer and I do FOH and monitor mixing and sometimes a bit of studio too and also a huge Brian May fan...

Question : Why don't you give the sound engineer a stéréo signal and let him do the mono sum (in a pre-fader aux output) feeding your monitor ?

Using a laptop is not a problem as long as you have a stable stand but you should not put so much stress on your laptop connectors. What I see in this video is not safe generally for the motherboard. If you plan to use amplitube on stage, you should connect your soundcard with a simple adaptator USB-C to USB adaptator
Keep on rockin !!