I'm beginning to sound like a broken record. About once a year I take a stab and converting my rig to be entirely computer based. Each time I get a little closer before going back to my old rig and wondering "what was I thinking". So here we go again.

After listening to a night of Antoine Dufour play some absolutely lovely guitar through a small audio interface and an iPad, I commented to a friend that I could just never get it to work for me and his response was that there's no reason for that and my issue probably had more to do with my rig being different than with it being digital.

So off I went ... again. This time I decided to start by trying to get an A/B comparison of the two rigs to be as close to identical as possible. I'm still using my analog preamps but I spent quite a long time tweaking my reverbs, delays, distortion, etc. I even discovered a "curve editor" in the Mainstage pedal assignments that lets you get real specific as to the behavior of your expression pedals (which by default were way off).

The biggest thing I did differently that really seemed to help was the looping. I've never warmed up to any of the software loopers I've tried and the Echoplex has always been my favorite so I setup a Mainstage aux channel to send/return the signal outboard and am continuing to use the Echoplex.

I almost went back a couple of times but stuck with it and I think I have it this time. I'll have to live with it for a while to be sure but I've never had the computer rig sounding this good before.

I'm going to sound like a total gearhead here, but...what kind of Echoplex? One of the old tape-based ones, or one of the solid-state ones from the 70s, or... ?

Neither actually. It's the "Echoplex Digital Pro" which was a looping device created by Matthias Grob back in the early 90s. It was sold by Oberheim for a while and then later it was sold by Gibson until it was eventually discontinued. For the longest time it was pretty much the Cadillac of looping devices and there are a lot of users of this device that are still clinging to it (including me). Still my favorite looper.

Welcome back, Glenn, to the digital side! I started there and never really had much of an analog pedal board. Good to see you can find your sound on it. It's ever so much easier if you can hang with the digital side.