Amps & Modeling

I Said Modeling Amps Would Catch Up in 2001. Here Is the Scorecard

By Mike · Published October 11, 2026

In late April 2001 I got into a few arguments on alt.guitar.amps about modeling amps. At the time I played tube amps only, and I wrote some things down that I can now check against what happened. This is a scorecard of my own predictions, using the posts themselves. It is not a verdict on whether any modeler sounds identical to a tube amp. I have not run a blind test, and I am not going to pretend I have. If you want the practical version of that argument, it is in Tube Amps vs. Modelers.

What I wrote in April 2001

The line I would most like to take back is also the one that turned out to matter most: “I only play tube amps. Right now, that is.” The next sentence was “At some point in time, that will change. The amps are on pace to get good enough rather quickly.”

I also wrote that if I could find a modeling amp with 95% of the tone of a few amps I liked, I would play it. I said pros could tell them apart from the real thing then, but that I expected the difference to become inaudible over time. I said touring pianists had already moved to digital baby grands, because pianos have fewer variables to model. And I said that carrying 250 pounds of gear to make a tone that gets miked anyway was a bit antiquated.

In a separate thread, someone compared a modeler to a CD, a digital copy of an analog sound. I disagreed. A CD copies a sound, I said, and a modeler has to reproduce behavior: how the amp responds when you play harder, turn a knob or roll off your guitar. I also wrote that I trusted digital for copying tones but not yet for creating them, and that this would change as the technology got better. About a hardware example from that month, I said a Line 6 POD into a board worked “decently” for guitar parts in a big band, though not for a guitar-based band.

The scorecard

The Fender specs above come from Fender's product page, which also lists a 100-watt digital power amp that simulates 22 watts and a 12-inch Celestion Neo Creamback. Other retailers list a different neodymium speaker, so check the exact model you are buying.

What I missed

In 2001 I was picturing a modeling combo as the answer: one amp, a few switches, a lot of tones. What actually happened is more interesting. The winners were floor and rack units that go into a powered cab, and a tube-amp company that decided to build a digital version of its own classic. I did not predict either.

I also did not predict that the cab would become the next question. I covered that in Do FRFR Cabs Sound Different? and why I moved to the Tone Master FR-10. The short version is that in 2001 I was worried about weight and versatility, and in 2026 I am asking what the speaker in the box is doing.

The “right now” part

I wrote “right now” in 2001 because I could feel it was temporary. These days the rack has both. I own tube amps, including a handwired '65 Deluxe Reverb and several Buddas, and when I sold off a big chunk of the traditional gear I kept the Kemper Profiler Stage on purpose. You can see the full list in what is in my rack right now.

If you are deciding which way to go, the useful lesson from the scorecard is not that I predicted the future. It is that the specs I cared about in 2001 were weight, versatility and reliability, and those are the ones the digital side clearly delivered. Whether it sounds the same is a question you can only answer yourself, with your guitar, through the speaker you will actually use. Do that test before you trust anyone's scorecard, including mine.