Positive Grid Bias Amp 2 and FX 2 Pro Bundle - Good and Bad

Positive Grid had a special deal on this bundle for about 150 usd. Seemed too good to pass up so I went ahead. I'll preface to say that I'm using Reaper, but I'm thinking a lot of the workflow and settings are similar. To get it to work as a DAW plugin where you can monitor it (effected sound) while recording, the setup can be a bear: 1) Set your audio interface setting to ASIO. 2) On a new track, arm the recording button, even if you are just monitoring the sound. 3) Turn on monitoring (the little speaker icon on the track in Reaper). 4) Mute the input on your DI (I use a Focusrite Clarett 2Pre and this required setting up a custom output setting in the Focusrite Control software). 5) If you are experiencing latency, you need to play with the sampling rate - I did this and still get some latency.

Good things: Pretty good amp models and speaker IRs. In Bias Amp, you can change preamp and power amp tubes to come up with custom amp settings. The clean and glassy amp models are pretty good. The crunch amp models are pretty good as well, but become fizzy on the higher preamp settings for the Super Lead 100 model, for example. I like the JTM 50 model the most for crunch. Lots of high gain models but I found them difficult to dial in - too much fizz, without a lot of good sustain. I recall the Soldano was the nicest sounding without all that much tweaking. In almost every case, dialing back the gain on the amp model and then adding an overdrive pedal (yes, there's an 808 Tube Screamer) in Bias FX came up to a sound that I liked. Re-amping post recording is a breeze. Just go into the track plugin setting and change that amp and FX choices and settings. A lot of the effects are good: Pretty good OD and distortion pedals, pretty good Fuzzface but it doesn't really clean up nicely when turning down the guitar volume, great rotating speaker sim, pretty good chorus effects - I like the Memory Man sim, good enough analogish and digital delays, and there's a POG sim too. Best thing about Bias FX, is that you can set up a stereo mix. This works great with panned chorus and delay, especially the rotary speaker effect and thru-zero flange.

Bad things: The hoops to jump through to get it working as expected. Latency. Here's something I found really annoying: If you use the fade-in/fade-out click and drag method on the recorded audio, the effected sound fades with the volume. Best way I can describe this is it's as if you're turning you guitar volume down before a distortion pedal. With Bias FX, you'll get an ad notification every time you activate it on a track. I also noticed that if I removed an effect, the overall volume dropped. Workaround was to remove Bias FX and reinsert it in the track.

Gotcha: If you insert both Bias Amp and FX into a track, remember to deselect Bias Amp once you've configured your amp settings and save it as a custom amp. You then select the amp in Bias FX.

Sound samples:

A few screen shots: