Welcome to the Wonderful World of Sansamp PSA-1
This trimester my major project suffered from lack of proper time management, and one of the worst parts was that I didn’t have enough time to record guitars through amps, only DI. I have never recorded a guitar without an amp since starting at SAE, and I never intended on doing it. However this time it was out of my power and I was forced to deal with nothing but DI signal. I recorded the dry DI signal straight from the pickups, and the Wet DI signal after it had gone through my musicians pedal board. As there was no time to re-amp I had to make do with the only amp simulator available to me which was Sansamp PSA-1.

I found this plugin to be incredibly versatile handling tones ranging from, clean, over driven, fuzz, modulation, reverb and ambience. For majority of the guitar tracks I used the wet signal, already affected by the pedals I had to simulate an amp to make them sound good, adding body and presence. Here is an example of the intro to one of the songs I recorded called ‘Alar’
This right here is a section of my final mix with all of the Sansamp plugins bypassed. Notice how warm and muddy the tones sound, lacking in presence, body and character. Now listen to the version with all tracks effected by Sansamp.
Aswell as a boost in volume there is significantly more treble and mids in these tones and they sound quite close to a real amp, compared to the unedited signal. The tones also have a little more colour with the pre-amp turned up simulating a gain knob.
I always turned my nose up at simulated amps thinking there was no way they could resemble anything close to a guitar cabinet, while they are still not the same the results are quite clearly positive. The plugin can handle distorted tones extremely well, as there is much variety and variation in the kind of overdrive you want by using the Buzz, Punch, Crunch, Drive and Pre-Amp knobs.
Sansamp’s usefulness does not begin and end at guitar. I have been using it on Bass DI since I started recording bass guitars and it’s always a great way to fill out the low end on your mix. Also very useful when tracking in the studio, if your bass player is in the control room while they’re playing and their amp isn’t in the studio you can give them a tone that would help them feel comfortable and perform to the best of their ability. Sansamp can also be used for unconventional purposes to get some unique sounds, for example you can drive the pre-amp on a vocal track to give it a lo-fi feeling, one of many uses for this great plug-in.
After using Sansamp and getting great results I am very excited to start trying out other amp simulators. One specifically would be Guitar Rig, which from what I have heard sounds like it’s far more versatile than Sansamp and the range of sounds available far eclipse those offered by the humble PSA-1.