As I’ve blogged about before, there are some really good amplifier simulators available as VST plugins. Leader of the pack is LePou’s virtual Rectifier, Soldano and Engl. If you have two or four rhythm tracks, making the same adjustments to all tracks or copying the plugins between them rapidly becomes very tedious. If in Reaper you route all your rhythm tracks to a centralized bus (usually by just adding them as children to a parent folder) and add the amp sim and cab impulse loader on that track, you suddenly get a weird mono version where all panning from sending (child) tracks are lost.
Luckily, I got a great tip from Wookieslayer at MG.org on how to fix this. Two steps:
1) Put the LeCto in stereo mode:
2) Set up two paired cabs in LeCab2 and pan them left and right (same panning percentage as on the respective child tracks):
Now you have a centralized bus for you amp sim with preserved panning. Not only is it much easier tweaking sound, it also uses less CPU as only single instances of the VSTs are active.
