All of this sounds horrible.. it doesn't even sound like his input is an actual guitar, it sounds like he's using a synth guitar sound or something. There's no dynamics, almost no sustain, no articulations. The outputs barely even sound distinguishable as a guitar through a tube screamer, even his actual tube screamer samples. (Possibly cause his interface is terrible?)
The conclusion is ridiculous given how simplistic everything is.
You can't use two tiny little clips to justify your model being high quality.
The true test has to even allow a bunch of guitarists to move all the knobs, plug the model into different amp & guitar combinations, put other effects in front of and behind it, etc..
The Tube screamer is called a Tube screamer because it's intended use case is to make the tubes in a tube amp "scream". Using it with all the knobs at noon is not consistent with this, it usually gets used with a tube amp that is already on the verge of distortion, and then you use the TS with the volume turned up a lot (3/4-max) and the gain quite low, this might be part of why this sounds so bad to me.
There are actually two different trains of thought on guitar effect modeling:
- Model it based on input & output waveforms like he's doing
- Actually model the circuit as an electrical simulation and then pass the signal through that.
I have personally found the second approach to be way more realistic and satisfying. The Yamaha THR amps work this way and they're really amazing.
One of the tricks here is a listener might not be able to tell a difference, but the guitar player picks up on a perceived change in how the guitar feels with these effects. A tube screamer has a lot of compression built into it for example. It causes everything to play to sound a little dirtier for the same amount of picking energy you put into the guitar. It will cause the player to play a little more lightly than they would without the effect. This is the kind of thing that makes a player reject the model and want to stick with the real thing, whereas the guy in the naive lab building the model thinks it's great cause they're not even playing an actual guitar through it. Once a skilled player tries it the "feel" is a dead giveaway which is which.
It's easy for some of this stuff to get lost on the electronics crowd if the background is electronic music. An actual acoustic piano is the only keyboard based instrument that has anywhere near the nuance that a guitar has, and a guitar still has way more weird stuff going on with dynamics and articulation. The range of inputs you have to feed into any kind of computer model to simulate guitar well is huge.