At Inside Home Recording, we find most of our listeners are also guitarists.
Recording electric guitar in a home studio used to mean setting up an amplifier, mic, and effects pedal (like my Fender amp setup) and trying to isolate the sound with foam boxes in your closet. Usually you still disturbed the neighbours and kept the kids awake.

Next came hardware digital multi-effects pedals (like those from Zoom and Digitech), which work quite well, but which can be a pain to program, and which often don’t give you the same flexibility in the order you chain effects and what kinds of speaker cabinets you’re simulating, for instance.
More recently digital audio workstations (DAWs) like GarageBand, Cubase, Pro Tools, and SONAR have come with their own built in guitar amp simulators, usually with lots of presets and the ability to tweak settings.
Even better are newer products from software companies like IK Multimedia, Native Instruments, and Nomad Factory, which have created plugins for DAW software—some of which also work as standalone programs on your Mac or Windows PC—that let you build virtual stacks of amps, speakers, and effects, and fiddle with the knobs and microphone positions onscreen, so you get the flexibility and simplicity of a physical amp setup without the old-style volume and cable wrangling. There’s even a free plugin called Free Amp that works on Windows PCs.

One that I like is IK Multimedia’s StealthPlug, which is a USB cable that connects your guitar with your PC or Mac, works with any audio software, has its own headphone jack built in, and also includes a stripped down version of IK’s AmpliTube 2 amp emulator, called AmpliTube 2 Live. Normally AmpliTube 2 is about $400, but the StealthPlug and AmpliTube 2 Live are only $130 USD.
AmpliTube 2 Live has a bunch of presets, everything from ‘50s rockabilly and ‘60s surf through Marshall heavy-metal stacks and modern pop-punk distortion. There are also settings for bass players, and you can use it for keyboards and other sounds too—harmonica, even vocals if you want.
Plus you can build your own setups with amp heads, speakers, microphones, and virtual effects pedals (some of which even look and work like my old analog pedals), and you can adjust what kinds of microphone you’re using, plus where it sits near the speaker.

The full version of AmpliTube 2, plus similar products like NI’s Guitar Rig 2 and Nomad Factory’s Rock Amp Legends, give you many more types of amps, speakers, pedals, and rack effects, plus more ways to combine them, more presets, and the ability to hook up specialized hardware foot controllers. IK even has a Jimi Hendrix edition that emulates Jimi’s old amps and effects from the ‘60s. All for more money, of course.

Of the many musicians I know, plenty of people are starting to use this kind of stuff to record, but I don’t know any guitarists who use a software setup like this at live shows yet—they’re not as comfortable as keyboard players are with having a laptop onstage. Plus they still like the visual impact of having the big speakers up there onstage! So in my band, for instance, everyone still has an amp, and either a multi-effects pedal or a rat’s nest of cables and pedals, just like in the old days. But that may change…

RELATED WEBSITE LINKS
www.insidehomerecording.com
http://www.insidehomerecording.com/?p=311 (specific tutorial on using AmpliTube 2 Live)

PRODUCTS SHOWN
IK Multimedia StealthPlug USB cable with AmpliTube 2 Live software ($129 USD) – main feature
IK Multimedia AmpliTube 2 full version ($399 USD) – “big brother” version
IK Multimedia AmpliTube Jimi Hendrix ($249 USD) – specialized, emulates Jimi’s old gear
http://www.stealthplug.com
http://www.amplitube.com

Native Instruments Guitar Rig 2 ($339 USD) – competitive mention
http://www.native-instruments.com

Nomad Factory Rock Amp Legends ($299 USD) – competitive mention
http://www.nomadfactory.com
http://www.nomadfactory.com/products/rockamp/

Fretted Synth Free Amp 2 VST plugin (FREE – Windows only) – competitive mention
http://frettedsynth.com/

Zoom G2.1u hardware multi-effects pedal ($279 USD)
http://www.samsontech.com
http://www.samsontech.com/products/productpage.cfm?prodID=1854&brandID=4

NOTE: If the Zoom pedal is not available, I will bring this instead:
DigiTech RP100 effects pedal (RP150 is current model) ($159 USD)
http://www.digitech.com
http://www.digitech.com/products/RP_newpgs/rp150.htm

MacFuse is an OSX port of the FUSE (File-system in USErspace) project. With MacFuse most FUSE compliant filesystems like FTP, SSHFS, and NTFS can easily be mounted as a physical drive in OSX. Once a filesystem has been mounted, it will show up in Finder as an available drive that you can read and write from.

Prior to being able to mount FTP/SFTP filesystems, web developers used to upload files to their websites using FTP programs like Transmit, CyberDuck or YummyFTP. Although these programs work very well, their user interfaces can be confusing. Using MacFuse and MacFusion allows you to use the familiar Finder interface to upload and download files from your FTP/SFTP sites.

MacFuse is a UNIX library that must be accessed from the command-line and if you are comfortable in a UNIX shell environment, you will find MacFuse to be rather easy to use. However, if the command-line scares you, there is another open-source application that provides a graphical user interface (GUI) to the MacFuse library.

MacFusion is a very easy to use and simple application that gives you a nice graphical interface to connect to your own FTP or SFTP servers. You can easily add new sites, then add those sites to a list of favourites. If you want, you can even configure to have MacFusion automatically mount your FTP and SFTP sites when your computer starts up. This can be useful if you spend much of your day moving files around your various websites.

RELATED WEBSITE LINKS
MacFuse Project Page
http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/

MacFusion – The GUI for MacFuse
http://code.google.com/p/macfusion/

CyberDuck
http://cyberduck.ch/