Review : Neural DSP Tone King Imperial Mark II plugin
Hey folks. I want to share with you my experiences with a plugin that I had never tried that absolutely blew me away.
Introduction
About six months ago, I was made aware of a fellow selling his Tone King Imperial Mark II, and idiot that I can be, I did not move fast enough and he traded it in at a local guitar shop. I happened to see it come in and told the manager I wanted to buy it. I did get it, but my own lack of action up front meant I paid $500 more than what I could have gotten it for had I just be more proactive. Stupid, all on me.
If you are not familiar with Tone King, they are a small company based in the United States that build what the marketplace likes to call boutique amplifiers. They are all hand built and hand wired and consequently are priced not for the faint of heart and as they are a small company of talented craftspeople, finding stock can be a challenge.
The Imperial Mark II is an all tube amp with two channels, built in spring reverb, built in tremolo and is a 20 watt amplifier with a single twelve inch speaker. It’s another of those situations where a twenty watt Tone King is capable of being a lot louder than a different tube amp with a higher rating. To get some of the voicings out of the Imperial Mark II, you need to run it up, and that may be too loud for some locations, so the Imperial Mark II includes Tone King’s excellent Ironman II attenuation system. It’s one of the best attenuators that I have ever used and a standalone unit is about $1079 CAD and my black with tan amplifier retails here for $3549, presuming you could find one. To my ears, it’s worth it, just like a Magnatone, or Two Rock can be despite very high costs and scarcity.
My point is that it’s a great amp. But being a great amp, that’s all tubes means that while it’s portable, there are risks and weights therein. To record it, you need a good microphone and all the accoutrements that go with that. If you are gigging, you get to carry it around.
The world has mostly recognized that a digital implementation of an amp can sound indistinguishable from the real thing, if the digital implementation is good. I would say that this is true of my Neural DSP Quad Cortex. It’s amazing, but also not inexpensive. What if you could run your guitar into a simple interface box and use your computer to be your amp and then take the signal from your interface into FRFR cabinets, or right to the PA? This works. I can also use this plugin to record any time of the day or night at whatever volume level I want and never worry about disturbing anyone. My first go with the plugin was at three in the morning during one of my frequent cannot sleep events. My computer, a guitar, an interface and a pair of Focal headphones and I was away.
The Neural DSP Tone King Imperial Mark II plugin
The plugin is available to work with a variety of DAWs, but also has a standalone version if you just want your computer to be your amplifier. It’s beautifully designed and very easy to use. I will augment the article with a lot of screenshots as you will see, but as an introduction, let me say that looking at the plugin is just like looking at the amp itself. The front panel and the rear panel are accurately presented and are not tiny impossible to see graphics. They are completely usable in size and visibility.
Neural DSP has done more that just deliver an amp emulation. They have modelled and included virtual pedals that can be used in front of the preamp. There is an excellent non-squishy compressor and a pair of overdrives. Heck there’s even a virtual way pedal that you can control with an expression pedal. Overdrive 1 has a green case and Overdrive 2 has a more brown case. Each is different and with only four knobs, getting to something you like is really easy.
After the preamp stage is the cabinet. It comes with two Impulse Response files that offer two different speakers. It also provides two microphones to use to mike the cabinet and each mike can use a different speaker if you wish. You can also load your own custom IR if you wish. I did not do that for this review because I was looking for a simple way to get my amp in a software version.
The microphone options are quite varied, and include, and I am using the Neural DSP descriptors;
Dynamic 57
Dynamic 409
Dynamic 421
Condenser 184
Condenser 414
Condenser U47
Ribbon 121
Ribbon 160
That is an excellent variety of microphones and they present different soundscapes as you would expect. You can defeat either or both microphones if you wish and each microphone settings also offers an optional “room” microphone to give you more space in the soundfield.
The next option is a nine band graphic equalizer which you can defeat entirely if you wish. It is very precise and while for recording I would normally think of a parametric equalizer, this is built for the player first I think. The actual Imperial Mark II does not have this option.
Finally there is another set of pedals that come after the whole preamp section, like an effects loop. There is no effects loop on a real Imperial Mark II and I really like what Neural DSP has done here. The pedal options are Chorus, a single / dual delay with tap tempo and a reverb pedal. These sound terrific but have very simple user interfaces so you cannot drown in option paralysis. They look like stomp boxes, so the learning curve is incredibly short.
Of course you can run your guitar through your pedal board before hitting your interface if you prefer, but I have to say that I am really impressed with the tonal quality of these virtual pedals.
The plugin also comes with a stack of company and artist presets and of course you can create your own. There are master input and output level knobs on every page so you don’t have to jump around to control either.
At the bottom of every page are five icons. First there is the gear icon which allows you to specify your audio interface. In my case I am using a UA Apollo Twin X and the plugin found it without me doing anything. Next is a MIDI icon because yes, the plugin is completely controllable via MIDI. I’m not yet a MIDI person so I didn’t do any testing of this myself but there are videos on YouTube by people who have. Next up is a large on screen tuner. Just so darn useful, particularly if your guitar is having one of those days where it is constantly falling out of tune. Then there is a metronome, suitable for practice and it offers options for multiple time signatures and user selectable BPM. In addition to the expected blip and beep tones, there are also a Block and Shaker, Cowbell, Drum Kit and Soft Kit as tone options in the metronome. You can push the metronome out the DI if you wish or mute it without stopping and still on screen where you are in timing. It also supports tap tempo. The final icon allows you to type in your tempo or use arrow up and down to set it where you want it.
If your instrument supports stereo out, like some Rickenbacker or Gibson 355s, you can set the input mode to stereo instead of mono. This is not a function of the actual amplifier.
There is a button for window size in the bottom right of the plugin window to allow you to control the size of the user interface.
A hidden feature that I found by accident is that by clicking on the Imperial MK II logo on the amp front, you can cycle through all the different colour options that the amplifier is available with in real life. My actual amp is black with tan, but for the purposes of fun I cycled through to the oh so fifties turquoise finish. Options are black with tan, turquoise, bright red, brown with tan and fawn, so you can have Tone King colour that you desire.
Sound Samples
For the first set of sound sample, I plugged my PRS 408 straight into the Hi Z input on the Apollo and loaded the Tone King Imperial Mark II plugin into position one of the audio FX stack in Logic Pro. The only editing done on any of the samples was to trim them, so no other processing was done other than to bounce each sample to MP3 for posting here. Each sample identifies the configuration used.
This first example, is the rhythm channel with the volume up a bit to bring the amp to the edge of breakup.
This next example is the plugin set for the Lead channel with the Gain at about 10 o’clock and the Volume down to prevent input clipping. You get a good sense of the nice harmonic breakup. For more overdrive even without using the included pedals, just increase the Gain. I did not record with the Overdrive pedals. The green one is very Tube Screamer-ish, not a sound that I like much, and the red one is more along the lines of a distortion pedal. Personally on my real Tone King, I just use the Lead channel and manipulate the settings when I want heavy overdrive and light to medium distortion. I’m not a fuzz pedal person, so I can provide no insight in that regard. This sample leverages the Delay pedal after the preamp.
This final sample is back on the rhythm channel, but with the compressor, chorus, delay and reverb virtual pedals engaged. It’s really quite a wonderful tone package.
In Summary
The Neural DSP plugin of the Tone King Imperial Mark II is by far the finest amplifier plugin that I have had the opportunity to use. At 99 Euros it’s not cheap, but compared to the cost of a real Tone King, it is a massive bargain and just so good. I recommend it highly for those who want to record with boutique amp tones without having to buy the boutique amp. I’m so impressed, my next trial is going to be their SLO-100 plugin since the probability of me ever getting a real Soldano SLO 100 is zero. Now if I could just convince them to do a Two Rock and a Magnatone…
