HD500 Patches sound thin & bad at stage volume ?

[TRandolph1957]

Good Afternoon: 

 

I have Yngwie Malmsteen  patch with Amp modeling that sounds great at lower volume but when I push it through my main stage amp ( Mesa half stack clean channel) at stage volume  it  sounds thin, sterile & fuzzy, Sounds terrible. I have had this problem with all patches that use Amp modeling & even the ones I have downloaded from the Line 6 tone mods. What can I do ? 

 

Thanks for time to read my Question & look forward to solution asap.

Sincerely Timothy.

 

Have a great Day.

 

 

 

 

[edstar1960]

You have to tweak the patch settings to make it sound good at volume.  So ideally you have to play it at the required volume and adjust to taste.  Typically you will need to boost the mids and lower the low bass and highs.   At low volumes we will boost bass and highs and lower mids  - that's just the way our hearing works - we can't hear the bass and highs so well at low volume.  So when we move to gig level volume we have to boot the mids and lower the bass and highs to compensate.

 

Good luck - hope you tweak it to your taste!

[alienux]

I agree with edstar1960 that it most likely has to do with not having enough mids when you are playing in a mix with other instruments.

 

If you have your bass/mids/treble set properly for a band mix, it will sound nasally when you play without a band and at lower volumes. If you don't like that for practicing, you might want to create 2 different sets of patches; 1 for practice and 1 for live playing.

[gunpointmetal]

You have to tweak the patch settings to make it sound good at volume. 

Live patches get set-up at live volume. The only way it works. 

[sidroe]

I use my PODs in many different ways but using REAL amps I have found that the AUTHENTIC sound of an amp IS an amp! I have a bank set up for just FX and NO amp sims. It's used as a glorified stompbox pedal board. I take the stereo 1/4 outs from the POD in to 2 Fender/Rivera Concerts miced in to the PA. It seems overkill to me to me to try slamming a Marshall Plexi sound thru a REAL Fender Deluxe or Mesa half stack.

When all is said and done the directs off of the POD thru the PA sounds infinitely better than playing thru a sim thru a tube amp that is sucking all the tone out of the sim! And then you stick a mic on a rig that sounds bad and put it thru the PA!

You can play around with it and get it sounding useable but I it never really makes you happy. My opinion means nothing as long as you can find what works for you. What works for me is POD direct in the board in stereo. Then depending on the venue I have a pair of powered monitors that run off of the 1/4 outs in stereo for monitoring guitar.

The main thing to me is getting the XLRs in to the PA and then figuring out that you already have good tone off of the POD. Realize that you are only using the amp/speaker configuration to monitor whats going out the PA.

I have worked probably 85 to 90 per cent of my gigs in the last 6 to 7 years with a POD direct in the board and just enough volume back thru the stage monitors to play comfortably. The main hurdle I had to jump was I don't need to carry around any amps to get good workable tones. Let the PA do the work.

[pfsmith0]

Wait a minute, if you're using the clean channel of your amp into it's speakers, you don't want any amp modeling. You're hardware amp is already providing the amp profile. Having the HD add another won't sound good at all. Listen to sidroe above.

[IBunn1756]

I think i have found the answer...i stumbled across a global eq menu (select output mode page 4/12 then goto page 11/12)

All the thinness and horrible fizzy sound can be reduced by playing around with 'high cut' and 'high' bands. I set the high cut to 3.6khz and high band i cut 5.4khz by 9db with a 'Q' of 0.5.  Instantly my patches became warmer and more realistic hope it works for you as well.

[DunedinDragon]

One of the problems with downloaded patches is you have no idea how they were created, and that can make a HUGE difference in how they will sound on your system.

 

But I have to go along with prsmith0 on this.  If your patch is making use of an amp model and then you're pumping it through a regular amp on top of that it's bound to be an unholy mess.  You can mitigate some of that sometimes by making sure you are using the right output selection of amp rather than line, but you're still going to contend with a number of factors one of which is two amp stages, one modeled and one real.  Alternatively you can take note of the modeled amp settings then replace the modeled amp with the preamp version of it and use the settings from the full modeled amp you noted down.

 

Even then if the patch was created and EQ'd using a FRFR style amp/speaker, that's going to produce a much wider bandwidth sound than what's produced on your MESA half-stack.  And again in this case you're also dealing with a modeled cabinet with a given mic in the patch being pushed through a real cabinet and possible different mic from your live rig...yet another mess.

 

Although I'm relatively new to the Line6 HD Pro series modeling and to this forum, I've been working with modeling for many years in various forms and it's something you have to adapt to.  From what I can tell there are a couple of different approaches being used by people on this forum.

 

Some people that want to retain the use of a traditional amp simply use the POD HD as an effect processor and leave out any amp/cabinet selections in their signal chains, or at a minimum use the preamp versions.  Evidently with enough tweaking and settings in the signal chain many are happy with this arrangement.

 

As for myself I've embraced a complete modeled environment.  Therefore both my stage rig and my home rig consist of powered FRFR speakers.  On my live rig I go direct out to the mixing board and use a FRFR speaker on stage as my personal monitor.  Even then you can run into some slight differences in how various speakers respond, but that's pretty easy to adjust.  For myself I don't bother with downloading patches for use.  I might download a patch to examine what kind of settings and effects they used to get the sound, but I'll typicallly just use that as a guideline.  I generally develop my patches on my recording studio rig which consists of a Pod HDProX going into my studio moniors which are Yamaha HS-8's.  I then convert and transfer the patch to the home practice rig which consists of the PodHD500X connected to a Behringer B212D (which I hope to replace soon) to work out my live sound.  Generally there's not a lot to adjust and over time I've developed a set of practices with my patches that help limit some of the bigger issues with very high and low frequencies which simplifies things.

 

I then use the Pod HD500X as my stage rig and connect it to a Yamaha DXR12 stage monitor and send the XLR out to the sound board.  Sometimes even there I may have to adjust some things, but it's generally getting pretty consistent now that I've been using this rig for a month or so.

 

My personal approach with this type of modeling has been to approach it more like as if I was developing my tone for a studio setting rather than live environment..thus the reason for having FRFR speakers as a primary element in all that I'm doing.  By doing that I can take much greater advantage of the possibilies in the modeling signal chain and I get a much more precise, managed, and articulated sound on stage that blends MUCH better with the rest of the band and produces a much more polished sound for the audience.

[cruisinon2]

I think i have found the answer...i stumbled across a global eq menu (select output mode page 4/12 then goto page 11/12)

All the thinness and horrible fizzy sound can be reduced by playing around with 'high cut' and 'high' bands. I set the high cut to 3.6khz and high band i cut 5.4khz by 9db with a 'Q' of 0.5. Instantly my patches became warmer and more realistic hope it works for you as well.

Bottom line is, you have to set up your patches at the volume at which you intend to use them, with the Global EQ OFF, otherwise there will be problems. Trying to EQ the Fletcher-Munson curve away doesn't work...it's putting a band-aid on a bullet wound. You're likely to have the opposite problem now...if you apply tons of EQ to account for large volume differences, when you try and use those same patches again at bedroom levels and the same global EQ settings, they're not gonna be anything close to what you now have at stage volume...you trimmed the highs. When you now lower the volume significantly, they're gonna disappear altogether, and it's gonna sound like your treble and presence are at zero.

 

Global EQ is really for fine-tuning for the room you're playing in, not patch creation, or for boosting/cutting large swaths of the audio spectrum. You need to start with a clean slate, everything flat...otherwise you'll find yourself overcorrecting for volume differences all the time.

[IBunn1756]

yes i get what you are saying but i'm dealing with a different problem...what i am doing with the global eq is restricting the range of frequencies out of the hd500 that aren't useful to the guitar ie: below approx 80hz and above approx 4-6khz realising that this unit is a full frequency 24 bit device when i narrow the bandwidth like this globally im simulating what a real guitar rig should sound like and it does work for me...distortion instantly sounds smooth with no biting harshness but still cuts through and i can dial up clean sounds with still  some shimmer.

this may not be 'technically correct' but i've been trying to get this thing sounding good for about 6 years now and as soon as i discovered global eq i'm totally in love with it.

Setting up this way now i can set up patches by ear and know that i'm within this frequency range and know they will sound good through headphones 
OR a p.a. system