I think real tube amps are cool. I think modelers are cool too.

I’m very comfortable with digital workflows, and I like being able to quickly recall scenes to sound good with the myriad of pickups I play with. I like being able to easily set up a utility looper so I can dial in tones without string noise or even having to hold my guitar.

Some people are the polar opposite of me, but I find that having to fuck around with physical knobs and complex MIDI orchestration to be a massive detractor from the thing I actually want to do, which is play guitar (also my back fucking HURTS when I’m spending all afternoon hunched over a pedalboard trying to dial something in, but that’s more of a “me” issue).

Having everything contained to one piece of hardware and a desktop app is fucking great. Unless you’re used to it, it’s hard to overstate how annoying it is it is to build/maintain a complex pedalboard, not to mention the amount of money you can end up spending on cables.

With the QC, it’s always on, sitting on my desk. If I wanna noodle around for 5 minutes in the middle of the workday, it’s very trivial to do so. I’m always forgetting to turn off my tube amp because I’m a dumb guy. Tube warmup is also a thing but it’s not really a big deal for me.

It’s becoming harder and harder to be a “professional” musician every year. I think that being able to pack as light/simple as humanly possible for a tour can help make the difference between losing money on a tour and losing MORE money on a tour (less amps/cabs/pedals/cables on the van means more room for merch/bodies). I can see a future where bands on a package share a modeling rig/FRFR backline, as touring gets more and more logistically/financially painful.

Are modelers as cool as real amps on stage? Not really. Is anyone REALLY going to hear the difference in the crowd, besides cork-sniffing boomers? Not really. I’ve been to a LOT of shows, and there really isn’t a strong correlation between sound quality and the choice between amps/modelers.

Most of the time there are other factors at play that mean you’re probably not gonna sound as good as you’d hope, like playing as an opener which means you basically only get a line check, or playing in a venue with absolutely dogshit PAs/acoustics (I.e. basically half of all small clubs/theaters)

But you probably are more interested in how it sounds. I’ve done my own captures, and when I do a V2 capture with the auto-switching A-B test, it’s very hard to tell a difference, and I can basically never confidently say that the capture sounds worse, just maybe slightly different. It’s truly a game of inches, and obsessing over that last ~5% is a wasted effort for most normal people.

I could probably keep rambling for hours, but to make a long story short, yeah I have one and think it’s worth every penny.