I've been playing with the Nembrini Nexus, a VST host where you can route any combination of things you can think of. I bought a MIDI footswitch and started hooking it up. I got all the effects that I have on my physical pedal board and the Neural Morgan Amp sim. My input is a Axe I/O One, which has only one input with some coloring in the preamp and stereo out.
A few things. First, I found a rad ass company from indonesia that makes inexpensive plugins specifically for the purpose of playing guitar virtually. I played around with some of the pedals and have been really impressed. They have a whole suite of amps that look cool, too. I'm considering getting their Orange clone. Check them out:
https://www.kuassa.com/
Here's some things I'm thinking of doing:
- On the signal flow for left channel out, pass through an IR cab - use this for DI into the live soundboard
- On the signal flow for right channel out, bypass the IR cab for direct signal - use this for DI into a physical cabinet
- Alternatively, use each output channel to do stereo effects and forgo the physical cab
- Set up pages for different effect scenarios
- Switch between different Amp sims
You can set up in the Nexus up to 6 different scenes, so it would be cool to have a live scene, a hybrid live scene, and a recording scene for output signal flows. I could set up some scenes for bass. The list of options goes on and on, it's just really impressive at this point.
The computer I'm using is a 2018 Macbook Pro with 8gb of RAM with an i5 processor. I've got the sample rate set to 128, with 2.7ms. There is no perceptible delay and everything seems pretty stable. My only concern is if the app crashes, but only experience with it will tell. And I could do more to lock the computer down and reduce resources. Now, I'm considering just moving away from the physical board entirely and doing everything with the Nexus, MIDI footswitch and a volume and expression pedal. I mean, why not? It seems only natural at this point.