Rick Beato is something of a bastion for the glory days of rock recording, when tube amps were king. So Nate Atmos was taken aback when his amp sim-powered tones drew praise from the man himself.
The Water from Your Eyes guitarist recently released It’s Beautiful, a three-track EP that follows on from the 2025 album, It’s a Beautiful Place, and it’s had the producer turned YouTuber saying just as much about his guitar tones. It turns out he had no idea it came from a simulation.
Asked by Guitar World how the band’s new obsession with watching gear demos on YouTube has affected the spangly experimentalist's new music, Amos confesses that it has had a big impact.
“A lot of it was exploring amp sims for touring,” he details. “I was worried about recording all the guitars on the last Water album with amp sims, when you have Rick Beato on YouTube talking about how nothing sounds as good as a tube amp.”
Indeed, the real-versus-digital amp debate continues to rage on. This, despite some ardent tube amp fanatics recently conceding ground. John Mayer has recently dropped a plugin with Neural DSP, and used a Quad Cortex at Coachella last year, while Slipknot’s Jim Root has also gone back on his anti-modeler word.
Yet Team Tubes still has many supporters, and Beato is one of their most vocal. In this instance, Beato was fooled.
“He ended up posting one of the songs, and he said, ‘Sick guitar tone!’” Amos reports. “I was like, ‘Dude, that’s a Walrus Audio amp sim with the stock IR!’”
Impressively, Life Signs, from last year’s record, featured in Beato’s list of top songs of 2025. Now, it’s unlikely that Beato will be binning his boutique amps and clearing space on his hard drive for a feast of new plugins, but it does show that amp modelers and amp sims are improving at an exponential rate.
One of the biggest bands in the world has been using them for over a decade. Modelers outsold traditional amps and combos in 2025. But there's still plenty of fight left in tube amps, as evidence suggests.
As Converge’s Kurt Ballou attests, the two can live symbiotically. It needn’t be one or the other.
Amos’ full interview will be published online in due course.
