# Neural DSP: Gojira for live tone



## Chris Bowsman (Mar 18, 2022)

Just bought a Macbook Pro M1, hooked up my iRig HD2, and downloaded the Neural Gojira trial. First off, sweet baby Jeebus, this plugin is sweet. I got some great tones out of AmpliTube iOS with the iRig, but this is plug and play awesomeness.

Two questions: Connected to a power amp and cabinet or a powered FRFR, is it going to be as awesome as I think, and is all the Neural stuff this cool?


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## Alberto7 (Mar 18, 2022)

I have zero experience playing live with anything other than an amp 12 years ago (I've been a bedroom guitarist for that long now), but you gotta watch it with clicking and skipping. I know the M1 chips are awesome, but it's still a chip that has to run countless other processes at the same time, and may have to prioritize an unknown process over your plugin for a millisecond, and you'll hear it when it happens.


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## concertjunkie (Mar 25, 2022)

Chris Bowsman said:


> Just bought a Macbook Pro M1, hooked up my iRig HD2, and downloaded the Neural Gojira trial. First off, sweet baby Jeebus, this plugin is sweet. I got some great tones out of AmpliTube iOS with the iRig, but this is plug and play awesomeness.
> 
> Two questions: Connected to a power amp and cabinet or a powered FRFR, is it going to be as awesome as I think, and is all the Neural stuff this cool?


IMO probably , yes. Been thinking about a live setup that used a Neural DSP plugin.
In my previous band, we toured for two weeks using Toneforge plugins (four instances: one for each guitar without cab sim on that ran to our cab speakers, two with cab sim running out to our split (in ears/FOH). 
Zero issues on that, and that was on a 2016 MacBook Pro, 16gb ram 500gb SSD, so the new M1 laptop can handle that no problem.
Bonus with using plugins live is the latency with patch changes. I’m used to accommodating for midi delay when doing patch changes , and this way, I had to be exact on the changes since it was instant! 

This is all while the laptop is running backing tracks, our programmed lights, click track, reference tracks, etc.

So given your setup with FRFR speakers , yeah, shouldn’t be a problem there! The load on this type of thing is not much to run a plugin.


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## concertjunkie (Mar 25, 2022)

Alberto7 said:


> I have zero experience playing live with anything other than an amp 12 years ago (I've been a bedroom guitarist for that long now), but you gotta watch it with clicking and skipping. I know the M1 chips are awesome, but it's still a chip that has to run countless other processes at the same time, and may have to prioritize an unknown process over your plugin for a millisecond, and you'll hear it when it happens.


This is true, just make sure all your background tasks are shut down (cloud syncing, anti virus, etc) prior to a performance of any sort and you should be good.
-coming from several tours of using a laptop live with no hiccups


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## Marv Attaxx (Mar 26, 2022)

If you can afford it it makes sense to have a computer just for the plugins without any other software installed that could run in the background. Or, as cheaper option, maybe use a second barebones partition with only stuff installed that you truly need to get the most stable experience possible. I've used laptops live and mostly without problems BUT the more stuff it runs the more potentail for problems you have.


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## LostTheTone (Apr 4, 2022)

Personally I would avoid using a computer for ANYTHING critical to your gig. 

Computers are better than they used to be, but when it comes to mission critical stuff they have a mind of their own. They aren't really made to be carried around like that, and have fragile pieces like screens and track pads and IO ports. They have weird stuff going on under the hood, like power profiles and sleep timers. 

And, assuming you need to ever use more than one channel and one sound, you are going to have a whole other layer of garbage going on trying to control your channels and effects. Not to say it's impossible, but it's just less robust.

Don't get me wrong, the Gojira DSP sounds dope as fuck. But be a normal human being and buy a floor modeler. 

If nothing else, you do not want to be the guy who shows up at a gig saying "Oh I was just going to use my laptop and I have no other options".


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