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I'm a new HD500X owner, but I had been a loyal Line6 customer for the whole POD series. What pushed me over was the 2.6 update. To me the HD500X provides: The Variax input (I have a 700 acoustic and a 300 with a Fishman Triple Play added) A pretty good audio interface Stable and flexible MIDI controller Some useful front of the amp effects Decent tones Pretty solid construction I've been using S-Gear from www.scuffhamamps.com for a while now, and my experience is that every amp in S-Gear is a pleasure to play. They sound and feel good on almost any setting and make you just want to play. Each one becomes my favorite every time I switch amps. The HD500X doesn't do that. It sounds OK if you tweak it hard enough, but not stellar. However, the HD500X with MainStage and S-Gear is a killer combination. Takes some configuration effort to get it all working. But its worth the effort. I'm working on a blog entry with the details. And the HD500X is certainly serviceable by itself for a simpler setup. Both use the same FRFR amp. I only use S-Gear for recording, but might eventually use some of the HD500X from of the amp effects instead of the Logic Pro X pedal board. What I found is that using Jeff McErlain's Guitar Effects Survival Guide course, and using S-Gear to provide reference amps, I've become significantly more productive tweaking the HD500X. I'm pretty happy with the tones now and am getting good use out of a very flexible unit. This provides some targets to strive for and provides a method to tweaking. Read the Positive Grid BIAS Amp Design Features too. This provides a lot of useful information about amp controls and design that take some of the mystery out of all the parameters. The end result doesn't sound as good as S-Gear, but its pretty nice playing live.

Not sure I understand your second question. I think you are attempting to put two devices into the HD500X, perhaps a guitar and the output of a MIDI keyboard. And you want different effects on each device. To do that, you would leverage the A and B signal paths in the HD500X. Set the input for the A path to Guitar, and probably Aux for the keyboard. Put all the guitar effects and amplifier blocks in the A path, and all the keyboard blocks in the B path. Then use the mixer at the end of both paths to blend them together.

Its not possible to put any effects blocks between the amp block preamp, power amp, speaker and/or mic, these are an integrated configuration unit. Effect blocks after the HD500 amp block are post-amp, but pre-FRFR or whatever amplifier is processing the POD output. The effect here is likely caused by the compressor. A compressor senses the input signal, and lowers the output gain based on the threshold and compression ratio. The attack and release times, and compression ratio is fixed in all the POD compressors, so the only control you have is the choice of the compressor, threshold and makeup gain. A distorted guitar is already pretty compressed or limited by the clipping in the preamps and power amps. So the compressor sees a relatively constant input at a pretty high level that's probably well over the threshold. So the compressor is on most of the time, smoothing out the guitar sound even more, making it sing with sustain. I think its pretty common in a studio to put EQ, compression, delay and reverb after a mic'd guitar amp to tailor the sound. So this preset is simulating that setup.

I've had good luck using a POD with a Roland AC90, going into the stereo inputs in the back. This works great for low demand situations, and is useful for acoustic guitar and vocals at the same time. I also have an home-made Tremolux Cabinet with two Eminence Beta-10CX 10†coaxial speakers, ASD:1001 compression drivers and crossovers that is driven by a Haffler Transnova power amp. I use this with the HD500X or with MainStage and S-Gear. I don't remember what this cost as I built it in pieces. Probably don't what to know. But it does sound pretty good.

Why don't you want to use the POD as you're audio input device? Its not an audio quality issue because you're going through the POD anyway, and putting it through another audio interface will never improve the quality. That said, most modern analog to digital converters do a pretty good job and you should't notice much difference going through an extra conversion. But usually the shorter and simpler the signal chain the better. If you'r on a Mac, then you can create an aggregate I/O device and use the POD and Scarlet together at the same time. This is simple and convenient. You didn't say which POD you have. If its the PODX3, then it provides different audio devices for wet vs. dry. The HD500 takes a different approach using a Monitor control on the audio input device. Turn it all the way down and you're feeding the dry guitar to the DAW. Turn it all the way up and you're feeding the wet signal. If you record dry, the HD500 is difficult to use for re-amping. You might prefer to use a plugin. I find S-Gear to be an excellent choice.

Thanks for the great information. I have a Variax 300 that I did some work on and it actually plays reasonably well. I put locking tuning gears on it, added a bone nut and set the depth correctly, use some lemon neck oil on the fret board (it really works!) and did a good setup and set the intonation. I recently added a Fishman Triple Play as well. So this guitar will now make a LOT of different sounds. What I'm struggling with is should I gig with it or not. I currently use a Variax 700 Acoustic and Strat Deluxe (with Tom Anderson stacked humbuckers). The Variax 300 doesn't sound as good on the acoustic or electric tones - but its not that bad either - to some extent, just different. Of course the strings are very different on the 300 vs the 700, and so it plays different for acoustic sounds. Its nice to get some advice from pros who do this for a living and have more experience.

Not sure I understand your question. If MainStage is playing a backing track (pre-recorded material), or you recorded a loop that is playing back, then you and the rest of the band do need to hear the track to keep on time. The suggestion from jandrio sounds very good. However, if you're just using MainStage to host software instruments that you play in real time, then is is no different than playing any other instrument live with others. You keep in sync by listening to and responding to changes in tempo that naturally flow through the music. MainStage can provide a tempo and click for the song if you want, but its not necessary if you're just playing live.

That may be true of modern high gain amps with a lot of preamp stages. But distortion in the old Fender Twin, Showman, Deluxe, Baseman was definitely caused by the power tubes. Those amps didn't have enough gain to clip the phase inverter. I recall my friend Doug and I attempting to duplicate what those power tubes were doing with biased diode clipping circuits back in the late 60's, early 70's. I still have the old Showman with an external Fender reverb unit in which I added an extra tube, low voltage DC power supply (off the tube heater supply) and high-speed switching diodes biased at 1.5 volts. It was remarkably close, missing the class B notch. We spent many hours in the Physics Lab at UMO with a scope and signal generator exploring and building. Doug's gone now, died young at 54. I still have some of the old notes we kept. He's missed.

Anyone know how the JTV 69 compares to the old Variax 300 for tones?

In a post Power User said "the main things you need to tweak are the 2 sources of tube distortion: drive and amp master volume (not to be confused with the master volume physical knob or the channel volume).." regarding the Brit 800, but this would likely apply to may of the high-gain amplifiers. I wonder what your experiences are on the differences between preamp and power amp distortion? On a typical Fender amp, you don't get much preamp distortion unless you add some gain effect in front of the amp to drive it harder. When these amps do distort, they do so symmetrically, the top and bottom half of the wave form are clipped the same since these are push-pull power amplifiers. Preamp distortion, from a typical triode tube, is not symmetric. The top half of the wave clips while the bottom half goes into saturation which is not as sharp. How do you balance preamp distortion and drive vs. master amp distortion? What is the difference in tone to you? How does it effect how the guitar feels when playing?

MainStage is a program that can be used to develop a live gigging rig. With MainStage you can select from a palette of screen controls (buttons, dials, drawbars, channel strips, etc.) and create a user interface for your setup. You can then map MIDI messages from hardware devices to these controls so that they can be change remotely. Each control can then be mapped to one or more parameters in a channel. The channels in MainStage look just like the channel strips for tracks in Logic Pro X and share the same software instruments, plugins and parameters. You can set the input of a channel strip, add audio or MIDI plugins, have bus sends, a fader, and mute/solo buttons. MainStage concerts consists of sets (folders) and each set contains a set of patches. The channel strips added at the concert level appear in all sets and patches. The channel strips in the set add specific instruments of the set, and /or override channel strips at the concert level. Patches in the set are for specific songs, and add channel strips or override channel strips in the set or concert for the particular song. MainStage also supports tracks that have loopers or backing tracks and you can map MIDI controls to the parameters for these plugins as well. I'm using the POD HD500X in a hybrid mode. I use a number of "front of the amp" effects from the POD (tube compressor, phaser, distortion, etc.) and these are configure for some of the foot switches. Other foot switches are used control things in MainStage (patch up/down, S-Gear Mod thing, Channel and Boost, MainStage looper, backing track playback, etc.). Regarding the lights, MainStage has the ability to send a MIDI command back thru to some other device, including the device that sent the message. I used this to control the lights on an Apogee GiO. It works great. I tried the same approach with the HD500X and it doesn't control the lights. Rather with I think happens is you can configure MIDI sends to control the HD500X effect block states, and these will in turn control the lights on the foot switches that are mapped to the effect blocks. It appears that just sending the MIDI message doesn't don anything if the foot switch is not mapped to an internal HD500X effect block. Since I'm using all the effect blocks for HD500X internal effects, there aren't any dummy effect blocks left to use simply to control the lights. Hopefully Line 6 will see this as a bug and allow MIDI sends to a foot switch that is not mapped to any effect block to control the light state. This would work the same as the Apogee GiO. I'm not finding this a big issue in practice. I can easily hear when the S-Gear Mod Thing is turned on, and the channel and boost switches make a big difference in the amp gain and voicing. So its pretty easy to hear the state of the foot switches, or see them in the MainStage display, or on an iPad using Logic Remote.

This has been discussed many times on many forums. It's not a problem unique to POD products - most people using amp modelers have similar problems. There are many reasons. Most are all based on tweaking out of context - headphones instead of speakers, low volume instead of gig-level volumes, by yourself instead of with the whole band, controlled situation instead of the chaos of playing live, long tweak times instead of having to do everything in a hurry. All these accumulate to fool us into thinking that something that sounds big, fat, wide, swirly, whooshie, big ambience, lots of sustain, etc. by yourself at low volume will be even better turned up and in the mix with the rest of the band. But the opposite is often true. Less is more when you're playing live with a whole band. Here's some possible guidelines/things to try: start simple focusing on the amp, speakers and mic before adding anything else Keep the cabinet resonance low or at 0. Pick the microphone carefully. Mics that sound bright and full by yourself can sound fizzy and icy when turned up and with the rest of the band. do all the tweaking with a backing track, hopefully made from your band, but something similar will do start the adjustments at low volume so you don't tire/kill your ears, but check periodically at the volume closest to gig level you can get adjust patches on the same FRFR amp you're using for live playing. Headphones or studio monitors are likely to sound a lot different then the PA If you have to use a guitar amp with the POD, try to use a power amp input or effects return and turn off cabinet emulation in the POD. Going into the front of a guitar amp will be challenging, and patches will sound entirely different than in your headphones. when adding effects, be conservative, keep mixes pretty dry. Effects can add a lot of mud into a mix making your guitar become indistinct. Don't overdo the gain/distortion. These can kill definition and the tone of your actual guitar. Check your gain staging between effects. Bypass all effects and add them back in one at a time making sure no effect is so hot its overdriving the input of the next effect in the chain. I like to keep effects at mostly unity gain - they're the same volume on or off. There are exceptions, when I use something like the compressor or vintage pre to intentionally drive the amp harder. This works good for Fender amps which are naturally lower gain, but should be unnecessary for high gain amps. Use the drive control instead Use a dB meeter (or audio tools on your phone) to set the channel volume so that you get the intended volume differences between patches. Once you get some patches you like in a live setting, use them as reference patches for tweaking at home. Once you know what these good patches sound like at home and through headphones, you'll have a good reference point for building other patches. Switch back and forth between the patch you're working on and the reference patch and think about the differences and how they translate to the song or what you're trying to achieve. Make sure you're not clipping the input of you FRFR amp.

Man, a blast from the past. I have a Lexicon MPX100 and MPXG2 I'd love to get rid of. These units were fantastic in their day, and still sound great. There are some effects in the MPDG2 that still don't exist anywhere else. But I love the flexibility of the POD HD(500x). I hate to admit it, and I'll deny it in public, but I like to tweak. Its part of the fun to me. Just to prove I'm crazy, when I use to play live, I liked setting up and tearing down too. And more than once I was taking my old Fender Showman amp and external reverb unit apart during breaks, got out the soldering iron, and tweaked the hardware patches I made before the gig. At least software doesn't burn your hands.

Reamping with the HD500 series is a bit tricky. You can use the SPD/IF output to get a clean guitar into one track and the HD500 modeled sound in another. But if you need to reamp for some reason, you have to use POD Farm or route the dry track back through the HD500. I'd use S-Gear or Bias instead if all you want is something on the computer.

Regarding MainStage, yes, MainStage has looper and backing track plugins you can put on a track. You can create a concert, sets and songs. Each song can have a different backing track. These can all be stored as a single consolidated .concert file for easy management. Hard to beat MainStage for the money.

I have the MIDI connector. And the footswitches do work. My issue is that I have no control of the footswitch lights from MainStage. What I think is happening is that the footswitch lights display the state of the effect block they are mapped to, and are not designed to be controlled remotely from MIDI. If you send a MIDI CC command to the HD500 that changes the state of an effect block, that will be indirectly reflected in the footswitch light. But if the footswitch is not mapped to an effect block, and is only being used for MIDI send, MIDI receive on the same CC has no effect on the footswitch light. Not sure if this works as designed, but this could be a missing feature in the HD500.

I'm setting up the POD HD500X as an audio and MIDI controller interface to MainStage to use with S-Gear and a Fishman TriplePlay MIDI controller. I have a bunch of HD500X foot switches mapped to MainStage controls and all is working great. These foot switches are not connected to any HD500X effect block in order to keep the MainStage and HD500X effect controls independent. However, I would like to have the HD500X foot switch lights reflect the state of the control in MainStage. MainStage has the ability to configure MIDI thru back to the sending device. I used this with an Apogee GiO to have MainStage control the GiO foot switch lights. I thought something similar could be done with the HD500X. But it doesn't seem to work. Should sending a MIDI CC to a foot switch (with the right channel, CC command and value of course) be able to control the FS light?

I've used quite a few cabinet models in S-Gear and find quite a bit of variability. Certainly it starts with the actual cabinets and speakers that were sampled. Even speakers in the same cabinet can sound different. Next are the microphones used to collect the samples. Then the room in which the sample are made can make a big difference. And finally there's the algorithms required to deconvolve, and trim the in pulse response. The latest version of S-Gear has some IRs that Mike Scuffham created himself. These, and the Rosen IRs sound a bit better than the Redwirez BigBox set that I got a while ago. Hard to know why. Bottom line is you can spend a lot of time tweeking cabinets with all these models, and never be able to decide which one is "best". Sometimes they're just different. Too many choices can be as paralyzing as not enough. I think the HD500 sounds pretty good. I too would like to see some improvement in the cabinet models. But maybe the DSPs and memory constraints might result in some limitations for future expandability. That's ok with me, I like the HD500X quite a bit as it is, and if I need something more for certain situations, then that's what the computer is for.

Seems to me that turning off the HD500 speaker emulation, and using external IRs limits the value proposition of the HD500. Once you've introduced the computer and plugins, you might just as well go the whole way and use S-Gear for the amp too. I use my HD500X this way as an audio and MIDI interface to MainStage. This gives the flexibility to use the HD500X standalone when its tones are good enough, and use it with S-Gear when I happen to need the computer for other purposes anyway. The tones with S-Gear and its cabinet IRs is significantly better than what I can get out of the HD500X by itself. But that's not saying the HD500X isn't great too. I like having the flexibility and choice.

The Looper switch effectually acts like a Mode switch for FS1-FS8. When you turn on the Looper switch, each foot switch send a fixed MIDI CC message on the MIDI channel configured for the POD HD500. You can't change the MIDI channel, or the CC message for these presses like you can for FS1-FS8 when the Looper switch is off. But you can map them to anything you want in your receiving device. I do this with MainStage for example. You will also need to turn the Looper Playback volume all the way down. Unfortunately there's no way to turn the looper off even though FS4 in Looper mode looks like it does this, and the documentation says it turns the looper on/off, it doesn't - rather FS4 sends the same MIDI CC message with the Looper switch on or off. Its the only switch that does this. And the Looper playback volume is global and not saved in a patch. So you have to adjust it every time manually.

Generally as distortion increases, bass and treble need to decrease. Too much bass makes the distorted sound muddy and indistinct. Too much treble makes it sound bright, fizzy, ratty, or has an ice pick feel. I use the Vintage Pre or Mid Focus EQ right before the amp to control the distortion tone. When I turn on the Vintage Pre, it pushes the amp harder and I use the low and high pass filters to adjust the boosted tone. Then I use the Tube Drive or Screamer in front of the Vintage Pre to get even more distortion. Bass, Treble and/or Tone controls on the Tube Drive or Screamer can further tailor the tone for the increased gain. Basically these effects are used to voice the amplifier for different gain settings. By using these two effects in front of the amp, I can get 4 different settings on two switches: 1. Clean - Vintage Pre and Tube Drive off 2. Blues - Vintage Pre on, Tube Drive off 3. Crunch or more aggressive - Vintage Pre off, Tube Drive on. 4. More metal-like - both on You can set these combinations up differently for different amps. High gain amps will behave quite differently than low gain amps and will need very different settings.

What specific POD Farm Acoustic is being included? American Classic Console Lo-Fi Modern Vintage Vintage UK Tube Preamp And will this preamp be HD? Or does HD mostly mean how closely the model reproduces the original, rather than the performance of the model (frequency range, distortion characteristics, etc.). That is, I want to use this for acoustic instruments and not have it strip of the instruments tone the way the POD X3Live did. Is HD really mostly about the cabinet impulse responses? These seem to make a very big difference in software amp modelers.

I got an HD500X for convenience, and because I have a Variax 700 Acoustic and a Variax 300 with a Fishman TriplePlay added. I use MainStage with S-Gear to manage the tones, S-Gear is the digital amp, and other MainStage tracks contain the VIs for the TriplePlay. I like technology I guess. When I first got the HD500X, I spent some time trying to reproduce the wonderful tones I can get from S-Gear. This proved to be quite difficult. S-Gear does not model amps, it is a small collection of boutique amps that just happen to be implemented in the digital domain. Mike Scuffham has made an outstanding product that seems to be way ahead of the typical amp modelers. So my setup is to use the HD500X as an audio interface and MIDI controller for MainStage and S-Gear, using some of the front of the amp effects from the HD700X into S-Gear, and using S-Gear's modulation, delay and reverb after the amp effects. This is a fantastic sounding setup, and is quite easy to use. I'm planning on a blog post on this as soon as I can get to it. The setup was somewhat complicated (but I actually like that). But, the HD500X is certainly convenient by itself too. So I studied what Mike has done in S-Gear to make those wonderful tones. What I found was there's a lot of tone voicing in the drive, channel, bass, mid and treble shift switches. Typically S-Gear amps roll off more bass and treble the more distorted the amp becomes. This avoids mud in the bass and fizz/ice pick in the high end, and keeps the distortion musical and responsive. I found by using the vintage pre directly in front of the blackface or other amps, and using the low and high-pass filters plus the gain controls helped create similar voicings in the HD500X. Removing the cabinet resonance and using the vintage pre for voicings seemed to result in very nice tones from the HD500X. They're not as good as S-Gear, but they're certainly useful. This setup seems pretty flexible and provides a lot of setup options to deal with different situations and needs. Overall I'm very happy with the results from the HD500X. I did a similar study a while back on Bias. See: S-Gear and Bias/JamUp. This was before Bias desktop, but I think some of the points still apply since whatever you create in Bias desktop can be loaded into JamUp on an iOS device.

Very interesting setup and application. Any sound clips available? If you have a Mac, you can use the HD500 as an audio/MIDI interface into MainStage and do all the backing tracks an looping (longer loops) directly in MainStage. Mics can go into the HD500 still, or using separate audio interface an an aggregate device to support the two mics in their own MainStage tracks. You could then create a UI and MIDI controls that are tailored for exactly what you're trying to do. The BlueBoard and HD500 could both be used for MIDI control, especially using the HD500 Looper switch as a "mode" switch which gives you 7 more MIDI switches that can control MainStage (you'll have to turn the HD500 looper volume all the way down though). And if you have an iPad Logic Remote works with MainStage giving you remote, touch, wireless access to MainStage.

The signal chain view shows you where the looper actually is, at the head (pre mode, post displayed on the footswitch) or tail (post mode, pre displayed on the footswitch). Anyone found a way to turn the looper effect on and off? I want to turn the looper off so that I can use the MIDI CC messages on the Looper footswitches to control MainStage. Currently I'm turning the looper volume all the way down - but that is a global parameter and doesn't get saved with a patch.