Anybody else liking the A30 Fawn + Hiway Cab + SM57on-axis combination?

[Meiannatee]

For quite a while now, I've been using the A30 Fawn (Nrm) with the Hiway cab and SM57 on-axis mic ALOT, with mid-focus EQ (hi-pass 15%, lo-pass 80%, wide Q of 5-25%). I was using the default cab (silver bell I think?), which sounded okay.

 

But once I switched to the Hiway + '57, the amp suddenly came to life. There was that restored chime and sparkle that was lacking before. The highs needed to be tamed, along with the bass, which can be easily done with the amp tonestack plus mid-focus EQ. At the amp, bass and presence is 0-15%, with cut around 80%, treble around 65%. Also boosted the "thump" DEP to compensate for the bottom end. Drive and "master" DEP around 40-80%, adjust to taste.

 

With my H-H guitar, it works so well that I use it almost exclusively now, replacing my old favorites, including the Black Panel Pete, which I felt sounds better with single coils. It takes the Screamer (TS) and Classic Dist (Rat) really well. It's also versatile. After rolling off the tone knob a little, it sounds great for ambient stuff with a delay and the Particle Verb.

 

At church, with a few variations, it covers almost everything I need. There's the excellent Soldano Crunch for heavier stuff, and a few amp-less synth and ambient patches, but that's it. I'm not sure if it'll work with your guitars, but no harm trying. Just don't be turned off by the initially sharp treble, it's easy to get rid of that.

 

I guess the lesson here is to experiment with different amp-cab-mic combinations, and don't be too quick to judge a particular combination before trying some pre/post EQ. Quite often, the default cabs/mics may not be the best choice. So please share your recent Pod discoveries!

[bjnette]

Will give it a go. thanks

 

I find that pretty well every amp model can be made sound good but some become our go to as having a quality that suits our style.

The cleaner tones are the hardest to achieve mainly in the volume needed without lots of mixer and FX boosts comparing to rolling off the guitar volume and gain on a higher gain amp some clean up okay others get that bite of slight crunch. 

[Meiannatee]

I find that pretty well every amp model can be made sound good but some become our go to as having a quality that suits our style.

The cleaner tones are the hardest to achieve mainly in the volume needed without lots of mixer and FX boosts comparing to rolling off the guitar volume and gain on a higher gain amp some clean up okay others get that bite of slight crunch. 

Hey there, just FYI, I have the input pad on, since my pickups are quite high output. I find most of the amps and pedals have TOO MUCH GAIN, and hitting the front end hard just makes it worse. That may help if you're trying to get really pristine cleans.

 

Also, I level my patch very differently, in that my reference point is an empty patch (so that patches with amps match my no-amp ambient patches with flat mixer). So instead of having to push up mixer volume for cleans, I lower the "volume" or "master DEP" parameters for the higher gain amps. I have no idea why the default settings are so loud, especially compared to the cleaner models. The end result is a comfortable volume for headphones with the master knob at around 12 o'clock.

 

I tried in the past, but lately I don't like much to cut frequencies on the cabs, the cab IRs should reflect faithfully how the real ones captured react to what comes into them, if you do cuttings on them it would be like lowering the IR resolution, which thing when in a hurry could be a quick way to solve problematic resonances, but IMO is not the ideal solution..

Totally agree with you for the ideal case. But many have complained about the Pod cabs, so I guess some of the IRs need some work. Typically, rolling off some sub-80Hz and low-passing over 8k-9k wouldn't be too detrimental to tone right? Would like some advice on this, as I haven't been comparing much with other IRs on my DAW.

 

Btw, was it you who posted an amp-cab-mic combination, but edited it out? The one with the JC120 cab. I was planning to test it out when I got home  :(

[brue58ski]

 

a personal very quick method I have to do the amp settings is to give a strum on all 6 open strings and while they are all ringing together I do the settings, well, probably I need a couple more strums to finish, but it works, doing so I can hear the balance between the bass mids treble and presence and tweak accordingly

 

 

A way around that is to use the looper. Set it to PRE position so you are looping a dry recording of your guitar and then let it loop.