Analog vs Digital Guitar Gear: Why the Future Is Already Here

Not to bore you with my day gig, but I do product reviews. I’m a bit surprised to find myself here, as I’m not great at techy things. I hate reading manuals, and having spent most of my life in the pre-digital age, I’ve developed a low rage threshold when it comes to dealing with technical issues. Get an error message twice in a row, and I want to throw my phone or computer across the room. I’m the kind of musician whose comfort zone is a traditional guitar plugged into a few pedals (tuner, compressor or boost, overdrive, delay, maybe a phaser for something weird), running into a tube amp with controls limited to volume, treble, mid, and bass—and maybe verb and trem. If I haven’t changed by this point, it’s unlikely I will.Yet, the PG reviews seem pretty popular. Perhaps the appeal is that the average guitar player can hear what the gear is capable of, even with a knuckle-dragging guitarist twisting the knobs—sort of like having a monkey test-driving a new car. Part of the draw may also stem from my being a furiously positive person who genuinely looks hard for the good in everything. My default mode is up, probably because I don’t handle the downs very well. That being said, when I review anything, I look at it as somebody’s baby. People don’t dedicate themselves to building guitar stuff to get rich (although a few do make a ton of dough-re-mi)—they build out of passion. I am not one to yuck somebody’s yum, so I search for the best a piece of gear has to offer and lean into that—rather than looking for the bad, like a bitter restaurant blogger. Even when it’s a sound I don’t find appealing (an extreme clipping fuzz, for instance), I understand that, for some of my 6-string family, this may be just what they’ve been searching for. The truth is, it’s good to be forced out of one’s comfort zone. When you have to make music with a sound or tone that’s completely foreign to you, it can take you to some very cool places you wouldn’t normally go. I usually build a track for my demos, and it often seems like the tones I’m least comfortable with lead to the most interesting backing tracks or playing, because I’m not able to rely on my comfortable old bag of tricks. “Analog won’t vanish, but in time, it’ll be a premium, ‘vinyl-like’ niche.”Last week, PG’s editors lined up a review of the Boss PlugOut Pedal for me. I admit, I experienced some initial frustration—and emitted some vile cursing—when I first plugged in the PX-1. But once I got past my tech fear, pilot error, and some Bluetooth issues with my phone, I found a lot of sounds I really liked. It felt like a practical way to bring a Swiss Army knife of a pedal to a session—something packed with just-in-case sounds if you need them. It also occurred to me that in five years, this pedal will be as normal to my kid as my 50-year-old Ross Compressor is to me.
To me, doing a gig without an amp feels wholly unnatural. But I know young players whose comfort zone is a Kemper/Fractal/Line 6/etc. into headphones. And in time, AI-driven tech improvements, combined with the rising cost of analog gear, will result in digital rigs becoming the standard. Stats back this up. In a blind test conducted by Sound On Sound in 2024, 90 percent of listeners found digital indistinguishable from analog.* In a 2024 Sweetwater survey, 55 percent of new buyers opted for digital gear over analog (up from 35 percent in 2020).
Digital amps tend to be more affordable, and offer preset tones that usually sound good-to-great without any tweaking (or the addition of pedals). They’re also more stable. If your rig consists of a tube amp driven by five pedals and a bunch of cables and AC power lines, there’s a lot that can go wrong compared to plugging into a Boss Katana loaded with onboard effects.
For casual and home players, who make up roughly 70 percent of the market, the low cost and simplicity of all-in-one amps and effects makes digital an easy choice. And as many Rig Rundowns have shown, the stability of digital amps, combined with their portability, has led many classic bands to leave their Marshalls at home in favor of modeling gear.
Analog won’t vanish, but in time, it’ll be a premium, “vinyl-like” niche. The combination of technology and economics makes digital inevitable for most players. Obviously, we’ll play whatever we can afford and acquire. So if analog is your thing, hold onto those amps and stock up on tubes.