Jase2677":2gdogss9 said:
What if you bought the top of the line computer, like an i7 processor laptop with 6 GB of ram?
You would have a very powerful music production machine. Make it a Macbook Pro if you really want it to be the ultimate music production machine, as Macs still rule the music production environment.
The computer will give you tons of flexibility. There are so many different modeling packages out there that you can certainly create one-of-a-kind tone this way. But the laptop trades one set of issues for another.
The laptop is still not an ideal platform for live performance use. Can you trust that nobody is going to knock your laptop off whatever stand it's on in a club? Or a roadie/sound guy who steps on it (if it's on the floor) while racing across the stage to get something done?
If you're doing electronic music and the laptop is attached to the top of a rack (picturing a keyboard player or DJ rig), it's probably safe from harms way. HOWEVER... you need a foot controller and some kind of interface to it. That might be the built-in USB, or an external MIDI adaptor... so now someone trips over the cable, breaking the USB jack on your laptop, etc... as a studio rig, the laptop with a choice of modelers and your own custom sound banks would be a fantastic tool.
But the Axe-FX is a real dedicated hardware solution. It goes into a rack for protection. It can be paired with various power amps to drive big guitar speaker cabinets. It has great response/feel, and it has some different models than you'll find in the various software solutions. But you turn it on and you're up and running, always. A laptop is regularly downloading patches/updating, takes longer to start up, etc. And the quality of the FX in the axe-fx are fantastic, so even if you get comparable amp models that you love for your tone, you'll get better effects, and more signal routing flexibility, than you get with many computer-based modelers. ALSO, the hardware gives you effects loops for integrating other external pedals and rack gear. Not all computer-based products are capable of letting you patch a rack item into the FX loop of a virtual amp, for example. Most of them just work with whatever input signal they get, which means you can only put pedals/fx in front of the virtual amp.
So yes, you can have a great sounding rig from software on a nice laptop. But it may not make sense if live gigs are the primary intended use. And what happens when the laptop's hard drive crashes? At least with axe-fx, you could stick another preamp in the rack and have something physical to fall back on if the box went down.
Scott
