Extended Range Guitars With Ampire: Meet The Bunn, Nick Hill & Gary Hiebner

The Bunn The Bunn (a.k.a. Scott Sokoloski) is a stoked dude from Canada who makes low-tuned, heavy music despite wearing guitars incredibly high, with very short straps.

After a life of touring and gigging throughout North America in bands, The Bunn started producing his own music, back around 2010. Super-low tuned stuff. Not djent though, and not with 7 or 8 string guitars. The tunes are a post-sludge/ doom kind of thing and with extra long-scale, 6 string baritone guitars.

Besides creating and producing material for Foreigns, Wetlands, & Venns, The Bunn is forever busy sharing production and practical techniques in working with super-low tuning and getting music done on his YouTube Channel.

Nick Hill Guitarist, producer, sound engineer and Solar Guitars Artist, Nick Hill runs his YouTube Channel focuses on mixing, metal, and tones. There, he shows how to create modern metal guitar tones, mix, master, and learn the process of music production.

He operates on Spotify both a solo artist and as part of a project called The Partisan Component with Jeff Plewa, an amazing metal vocalist.

Gary Hiebner Gary Hiebner is a South African guitarist, music producer, content creator, and YouTuber. He started off as a guitarist in the South African music scene in the early 2000's and from there gathered an interest in music production.

Through learning the different software audio applications available Gary developed a keen interest in music tuition and for the last 8 years he has been creating and providing music tutorials courses on many of the audio DAWs, plugins and effects available on different teaching platforms.

Currently he is a course creator at Groove3 and he also runs a YouTube Channel (Heavy Tones) where it focuses on heavy, low tuned guitars productions and how to get the most out of your heavy low tuned guitars from dialing in a killer tone for low tuned guitars all the way to guitars setups for low tuned guitars.

Because of their depth of work and respect in the extended range guitar online community on YouTube, PreSonus was so fortunate to have these three gentlemen so graciously and enthusiastically help out with creating most of the Presets (and sound examples on our website) for the recent PreSonus Ampire High Density software add-on pack that was just released. Thank you so much for your time and effort guys!

Let's get to know them a bit better and how their workflow history intersects with PreSonus hardware and software.

PreSonus: How did you discover Studio One?

GH: I started off working in ProTools probably in about 2004, and then moved over to Logic in about 2006 and used that for a good couple of years. But around 2012 I started using Studio One alongside Logic. But I found myself preferring the workflow of Studio One. The interface is smoother and cleaner and with the new updates they have really been adding some great features that help my workflow.

TB: Initially through owning PreSonus hardware (since the FirePod and FireStudio, currently STILL using an AudioBox22 VSL which has been super solid for the last 5 years!). Bundled with the interface was an Artist version of Studio One. I've really taken to it in recent years (Studio One Pro) since connecting and collaborating with fellow YouTuber, Nick Hill. Nick is a veteran Studio One user and a great mixer. In our musical collaborations everything happens in twin setups of Studio One so that Nick can seamlessly go to the mix stage.

NH: I was definitely a little late to the Studio One party. I recall my early days of audio recording exploration, this would have been the early 00's, using early versions of DAWs like Digital Orchestrator Pro and then moving into Reaper thinking THAT jump was massive. I tried various other offerings and my best friend Lenny had discovered this DAW called Studio One. At this point, it may have been toward the end of Version 2's life cycle but we jumped in headfirst and the rest, as they say, is history.

PreSonus: If you explored Ampire in previous versions of Studio One, what are your thoughts on it now versus then?

TB: I started to pay attention to Ampire in Version 4, of particular interest was the Double . I'm a huge fan of Rectifiers and needed to try it. The amp itself sounded pretty great, however Ampire as a environment was missing some key functionality and features in order to make it part of my regular routine.

NH: I remember trying early iterations of Ampire and thought, oh this is neat, but I won't really use it. The personal workflow I've developed and grown to feel most comfortable with has been hardware or externally based ie audio interface, using mics, capturing real sounds/amps/acoustic instruments, and then on to using hardware like the Line 6 Helix but as Ampire improved, I found myself using it for various mixing and layering tasks, adding in some melody lines, ambient guitar parts and overall ear-candy to some of my mixes and projects.

GH: In the beginning, like in version 2 where I started, Ampire was very basic. I was jumping for other Amp sim plugins to get the tone I was after. But I only really started exploring Ampire again with the new State Space Modelling. The Amps sound sooooo much better now. More realistic on getting that sound that you hear from a real amp. Where it sort of sounds like you can feel the air pushing out the speaker. So yeah the new version of Ampire has really come leaps and bounds from the earlier versions.

PreSonus: What do you think about the 3 new amp models in the Ampire High Density add-on pack?

NH: Having had some time to play with the new High Density stuff, It's safe to say that these newly modeled amps stack up against some of the big-name, 3rd party offerings.

GH: I love all the new amps. Obviously I am more inclined towards amps catering towards high gain. So these new amp

LINK:	https://blog.presonus.com/index.php/2020/12/18/extended-range-guitars-...
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