It’s pretty simple..

I’m basing it on the fact that the Axe-fx II is approx £2,000 (or $2000 or whatever currency really it’s purely for illustrating the point)

A laptop dedicated to the task can easily be bought for £300-400, I’m not keen on posting direct links as that seems a bit cheeky for the forum, but ebuyer has numerous laptops, dual core i5’s, half tera drives, 4gig ram etc all from £260 upto £400, there is a good selection on the low end, and they more than exceed the requirements to run a full project, let alone a few standalone instances of some plugins running real-time.

Then the pre-amp, apologies for any confusion but I mean the interface, i.e. a good way of ensuring the signal coming in from the guitar remains as clean as possible. For that single task you can get a very simple high quality interface. Focusrite do them from £100 upwards.

So we’re at say £600 max for a setup which can now not only produce tones (lets not forget about the huge library of free preamps, modellers, IR’s etc, some of which have actually been used in the Axefx firmware…) but we can also record our own music and can give me pretty much limitless instances of any routing i’d want, all still rendered digitally.

Now throw in something like a behringer FCB-1010 (approx £115) which gives you almost complete midi control of your laptop, (midi learn functions are almost second nature in alot of the amp sims) and I went for the UNO chip mod which helps flexibility even further (another £15 or so, 5 min install by hand), even chuck in a novation nocturn for £70

After that you could still even go and buy a few used items or new, a 2nd hand sansamp PSA1 goes for about £250 here in the uk for example.

All I’m saying is look at all the gear you can get for less than half the price of the Axe-Fx, for the rest of the money, you could buy an extra pair of handy reference speakers, say some PM1’s which are handy (around £350 a pair), a couple more monitors for your home DAW (2x 22″ @ £150 ea.), and still have money to burn on some random purchase of a vintage pedal you’ve always wanted to buy. I joke but you see where i’m going with this madness 🙂

The fact about having cabinets etc is moot due to the fact we were talking about modellers and guitar fx in general, even if you have an Axe-fx I think it’s still obvious you’d need an amp for live (aside from going direct to desk)

I’m not an Axe-fx hater, far from it, I think they’ve created a powerful unit dedicated to the task which can yield excellent results. I just feel that in this age where technology such as laptops are so readily available etc we can explore other potentially more cost effective, potentially more flexible options, surely it’s open to discussion.

For the record I’ve had extensive experience with a lot of the processors on the market Axe-fx included (but not the Axefx II, although doesn’t it feel more like an Axe-FX 1.5? anyway) but over time you begin to formulate which units have the best workflow and overall sound which works for you.

Regards

D.