DunedinDragon

Probably the best way to describe a compressor is it "squashes" the sound. In other words it doesn't allow notes to go past a certain amount of volume while at the same time brings up the low volume notes. So as Cruisin says, it brings them together to roughly be at the same volume. Think about the beginning riff on the Rolling Stones "Start Me Up". That's a relatively clean guitar with just a slight amount of drive, but it's fairly heavily compressed. In a way it kind of makes it seem louder than it really is. EQ is another matter altogether. Of course you automatically have a certain amount of EQ with any amp model in the treble, mid, and bass controls. Those controls have a pretty broad range though. The other EQ's are simply used to fine tune the broad EQ on the amp model. The Global EQ is applied across the board to all patches, but the individual EQ effects are assigned by most people including myself toward the end of the signal chain. A graphic equalizer simply has a set number of discreet frequencies that you can either turn up or turn down in volume. Most of the other equalizers are some form of parametric EQ which allows you to dial in a specific frequency (and width of the surrounding frequencies adjacent to it) to either add or subtract volume. As an example I often use the Studio EQ at the end of my signal chain to address the bass boominess that occurs on certain amp models. As Cruisinon2 says, some of the amp models tend to be a bit bass heavy. But in reality that can be controlled pretty easily by selecting the Low Frequency option on the Studio EQ, setting it to either 500 or 700 Hz, then selection the Low Gain option and reducing the volume of that frequency range to about the -3 to -5 range. That will leave a fairly tight and solid bottom end without the boominess. The most important thing to remember with EQ is you are just trying to emphasize or de-emphasize certain frequency areas, and very often you can achieve the emphasis you want by de-emphasizing a different area. For example, in the case I cited above, getting rid of the boominess will often make it sound like you have more low mids without having to emphasize the low mids. Again, as Cruisinon said, the most typical problem people have with distortion is using too much of it. The more distortion you use, the less articulation/clarity you have on the strings you play. For a lot of my overdriven songs I use the amp model's drive/gain to get it just a couple of ticks past where it starts to break up. That keeps the power chords tight and overdriven, but not floppy and muddy. I typically use a tube screamer for leads because that has an extra level of EQ control to manage where it sits in relation to the rest of the instruments so it can stand out and sustain well without having a whole lot more volume. Again, you don't want or need to overdo the gain because you just want to get plenty of sustain without reducing the amount of articulation/clarity in the notes you're playing in the lead.

The first question to resolve is whether your PC is recognizing it. You need to check in your control panel for audio devices. It may also be that the PC is recognizing it but the default is set to some other audio device, so you need to change the default. Logic only sees what the operating system sees.

One thing for sure with high output pickup like that, you'll get to the saturation point in gain faster than with a less sensitive pickup. If you think about what a high gain signal looks like on a scope, the very nature of high gain is to chop off the peaks of the signal which produces the overdriven sound. When you add a compressor into the mix you're increasing the volume level on the low side of the signal making the difference between the chopped off peaks and the non chopped off signal less. This would result in less articulation or what you might call saturation of the signal. Where this would likely show up would be in the pick attack which would have less definition. This is what I was referring to when I said high gain signals were pretty much squashed anyway, and a compressor just adds to the squashing.

I haven't seen a need for a compressor in higher gain tones as the overdriven tones are pretty well squashed anyway and I get plenty of sustain from the available pedals. Mostly I use compressors for late 60's clean/crunchy tones like the Rolling Stones or The Who to even them out. Where I've used them consistently is on fully strummed clean tones (similar to an acoustic guitar) or particularly when finger picking on my hollow body Gretsch to get that Chet Atkins sound. But I'm really not looking for sustain as much as I am a more balanced response across the strings.

I guess I don't experience this type of complexity in my gigs because each song has it's own dedicated patch. The most complexity I've run into are situations in which I have multiple effects assigned to the same footswitch, more or less creating the effect of a second patch in songs where there's a need for a fairly dramatic shift in the sound palette.

I think a lot of this tends to work it's way out the longer a band is together. Our band has been together coming up on 8 years, but I remember the first year or so trying to find that sweet spot of volume mix where everything matched up correctly. That can be a challenge with 7 people in the band. Sometimes we were dead on, but most times something would be out of whack, and it was never the same thing. The two things that really helped us was getting a good multi-channel live recording and then, from mixing that recording, learning where each instrument and voice needed to be in terms of relative volume and using that to gain stage everyone on the PA mixing board. That took care of the mix out front, the stage mix has just been a process of each discovering where our amps need to be set and sticking with it. This was made a whole lot easier through the use of electronic drums and modeling setups. What makes me feel good is that we can literally step into almost any environment and we'll have the same mix, or very close to it, every single time.

I can't say I can recall every nuance of the conversation, and honestly it's not all that important. What I do recall is Hugh's initial discovery of the relationship between resonance and the presence control motivated many of us to examine it for ourselves and provide feedback with what we discovered. And I have to say it was a significant finding as it lead to a number of improvements in how I now develop my patches. I think his summary which he then posted later is a very accurate accounting of both his discovery along with several other inputs by others here of how those controls interact. Ultimately a very useful exercise.

Being bored I decided to peruse some of the training materials posted above in this forum. Of particular note were the tone templates. What I found interesting, and something I've been wondering about for a while now is the general lack of complexity in those setups which were ostensibly copied from the setups used by major artists. For example, I don't see a whole lot of effects except on the ones you expect like David Gilmour and Jimi Hendrix. More importantly you don't see any with dual amp configurations. I find this interesting because I see a lot of discussion in this forum regarding dual amps, and mountains of effects. I know for myself I have about 50 or 60 presets developed which match up with my band's repertoire of songs. So far, no dual amps, no mutiple signal paths with various effects. In fact, aside from the loop and volume pedal I think the max effects I may have in any one patch may be around 4 which includes a final EQ effect. I'm not saying I don't do a considerable amount of tweaking on the amps to get the sound I'm after including some of the DEP, but so far I haven't found it necessary to add to the complexity of the signal chain to get the sound I'm looking for. This makes me wonder if some (or maybe a lot) of this complexity is driven by "what I am able to add" versus "what do I really need". To give a specific example of this, I was developing a patch for a specific song the band does which uses some fairly hefty overdriven sounds and it seemed to me that the level of overdrive was washing out some necessary detail. I first thought about splitting the signal chain and adding another amp with some cleaner attributes. But then I thought about the BIAS control. I adjusted that and in no time I had the detail I wanted. Don't get me wrong. I love all the capabilities the POD provides. I like to have options. But I wonder if it doesn't also cause people to add unecessary complexity and introduce unforseen additional artifacts. that a simpler approach might not. What do you guys think?

Yeah...handing source code out to a bunch of amateurs sounds like a REAL good way to increase the number of bugs....

I wouldn't think so. As far as I know you don't even need to have a connection to the internet for HDEdit to work. So there's no way it can check registration info.

You can do this either directly from the controls on the unit, or through the edit software. However, the pre-requisite for doing so is to read the instruction manuals.... B)

I'd check them out but as has been noted here many times, because of the wide array of ways people setup their systems as well as the type of guitars they use, you can't really go on much in terms of feedback unless just by chance they're using the same kind of setup and guitar/pickups as you are. To me CustomTone is more of an educational tool than a tool I'd turn to for getting patches. I find I'm better off just starting from scratch and building my own to match my setup and which guitar I'll be using for that particular patch. However if I get some time maybe next week I'll try to download a couple and look through your parameters and maybe share some ideas about things.

I wouldn't think you'd need much more volume outside. When we play outside we're still pretty close to our same inside volume unless it's a much larger stage. You have to remember the sound going out front comes from the PA, so you only need enough volume onstage for the band. I bring this up because I'm often called on to do sound for outdoor events and invariably you get bands that think it's up to them to get their sound to audience. The problem with that is they only end up interfering with the mix, not helping it. One time I had a guitar player who insisted on cranking his Marshall stack. I explained to him that all he's doing is overwhelming the mix in the first few rows of people. He didn't turn down so I removed him from the mix. So the only people in the outside event who even heard his guitar were the ones toward the front on his side of the stage. On the other side of the stage and throughout the rest of the event area they heard a nice mix of everything else, with his guitar more or less a whisper in the background. Guitar amps aren't built for projecting sound over long distances like PA speakers are. Leave it to the PA system to do the heavy lifting, and try not to compete with it. You'll only lose.

As long as you're comfortable and confident with your setup that's all that really matters. I personally have a problem with IEM's or any situation that provides a mix to the band that's different than the mix going out front. I can't count the times that what sounded great on the stage mix sounded completely different in the audience. Especially in worship situations where they tend to bury the guitars (and most of the other instruments) and overaccentuate keyboards and vocals. But that's what you get typically with volunteer sound people. Good luck with the drums...that's why we use a high end electronic kit. It's so simple with that and so incredibly complex with an acoustic kit.

The accuracy of your sound will be more dependent on the monitor you're using than the 2i2. Using the 1/4 out into the 212 should be an accurate representation of what will happen with the live mixer, but unless you have a pretty decent speaker you won't really hear the same thing as what the PA puts out.

I know I'm in a bit different situation as I go direct to the PA but I also have my powered monitor on stage direct out from the 1/4" POD output, but I have had the PA speakers turned toward me on the stage when I've gone through my setups (they're QSC KLA-12's pole-mounted) and I'm getting pretty much the same thing as is coming out of my speaker. I have gone through a lot to get my powered monitor to be consistent with the front of house speakers including adjustments in the global EQ for lows and highs. But I still only use my Yamaha DXR-12 at home for setting up my patches. In my case I have the speaker vertically mounted at home on a bar that's about 4 feet high about 5 feet away. When I get to rehearsal my monitor is situated behind me on the floor as it is in the worship performance, and I only ever have to make small minor adjustments sometimes due to the difference between having my home monitor which is set for PA and the rehearsal/performance speaker which is set for MONITOR (which eliminates some of the bass build-up). By the time I get to the performance I very rarely have to tweak anything. I was having to adjust some of the output levels, but ever since I started using a sound meter to normalize my patch volumes I don't even have to do that. I know my tone on stage is consistent with the fronts because several of the singers as well as the other guitarist will go out into the audience area during rehearsal at church and they tell me my tone is the same out front as it is on stage. Which brings me to the real question I have for you. If you're going solely through the PA, how are you monitoring your guitar on-stage? If it's through standard floor monitors or in-ear monitors could the be accounting for the difference you're hearing in your tone? It appears you have powered speakers that should be consistent with a decent front of house system, but maybe I'm making a wrong assumption. What does your front of house system consist of? EDIT: One other thought I had. Early on I realized using a wireless guitar connection was dramatically changing the output of the guitar, so I only use wired connections both at home and in performance. Is it possible you are setting up your tones on a wired connection and using wireless on stage and that's accounting for some differences?

Just wondering...does your lollipop get larger the more volume you have???

I've tried it with headphones, but my headphones weren't really "flat" in terms of response. They tended to accentate lows and deaccentuate some of the highs. This resulted in me having to adjust things once I got to the rehearsal space. So now I only use what I'm going to play through which is my powered monitor and I rarely have to make adjustments once I get to rehearsal. But to be honest, I don't know if it's really due to using the monitor, or simply just improvement in my skills for dialing things in.

There's no doubt many of us had to change our approach from our previous rigs to account for the delay between patches. I commonly used different patches within songs when I was using a Mustang IV, and it generally worked very well. But I'm not married to only one way of doing things. With the range and flexibility the POD provides I was easily able to accommodate vast differences within a song without having to resort to patch changes or even changing to 1-8 mode. But I guess it's unthinkable to some people to consider taking a different approach than what they're used to. Thank goodness everyone doesn't feel this way or we'd still be riding to work in a horse and buggy....

This goes along with something I've often mentioned but I think it's worth re-stating here when it comes to using a FRFR setup. Although there are a variety of ways people may opt to use the POD HD, if you're using it as a modeler going direct to the PA mixing board and/or to a FRFR monitor and you want to get the very best out of that arrangement, the paradigm and approach you should use is FAR more like what you would do in a recording studio than what you would do in a typical live stage setup. When approaching a guitar sound in a recording studio you're looking to find a sonic space where the guitar adds to the mix. What this means is not thinking only about the guitar, but where that guitar sits in the mixture of drums, vocals, other guitars, keyboards, etc. Because of the accuracy of FRFR setups the effect of different mic's, different cabinets and resonator effect, EQ, SAG, BIAS, etc. can all be useful in finding space for the guitar that stands out without having to rely solely on volume. As an example, in our band we have drums, bass, two guitars, harmonica, and (typically) one lead vocal and two harmony vocals. One of the songs we do is a song written in 1948 and redone in many different styles called "Satisfied Mind". We've do this song in a 1970's funk style similar to Average White Band, but without the horns. My part in all of this is to add a lot of funk colorations similar in many ways to the guitar work done on AWB's 'Cut The Cake'. For this setup I use a Fender Strat on the middle pickup position and my signal chain consists of a Tube Comp with Threshold at about 75%, Level at about 19%, a Twin Reverb amp with just enough gain to give it some bite, bass, mid, and treble all in the vicinity of 50%, and presence at around 40%, and that's it. No reverb or any other effects. I normalize the volume of the output to be at roughly 80db which is where I keep all my patches. When I play this patch by itself it's very "strat" like, even almost to the point of sounding like a telecaster, and not very full, and when played with the band it doesn't appear to have a lot of volume, but it cuts through the mix very nicely and can be heard clearly even at it's perceived lower volume. Some of this is due to the very strat-like sound, but a lot of it is due to the Twin amps brightness and shimmer and a very dry signal. These are considerations that would likely be more at home in a studio than on a live stage, but the effect on the stage is a studio-level sound in a live environment, which is remarkable in my opinion. This is why I advocate that if you're using a FRFR setup, you may find approaching your sound as if you're a recording engineer finding space for that instrument in the mix a much more productive paradigm than just dialing in a tone for yourself in a vacuum.

I agree with the consensus here. Global EQ has been far more useful adapting to a set of FRFR speakers than adjusting to room acoustics. Chances are if the room acoustics are having that large an effect on the the sound of your guitar, you'd never know it from on-stage anyway. You will, however, know when all of your patches have too much bass or treble when played through a given FRFR speaker because of it's response profile. Chances are, if you're working with a decent front of house system and a decent FRFR speaker as your monitor, the front of house is likely to have the same response profile, or close to, your FRFR speaker. So adjusting my Global EQ to compensate makes patch construction much simpler and FAR more consistent.

That's a REALLY good point Jeremy. I think a lot of people underestimate the value of finding unused sonic space for their patches. Especially if you're playing with other guitars or keyboards.

Hughanico, If you do decide to delete the post, I think it would be worth a different post at some point that recaps some of this procedure, but maybe not as an absolute fix-all, but as a tool that can be used to "un-muddy" certain situations. I know I've personally benefited from the awareness of these two parameters and their combined effect on some of my patches, and I think it's worth documenting it in some way for newer users. At least if people are aware of it they can experiment with it and possibly find what they're looking for in their tones.

Helix IS the budget stop gap between Line 6 and AxeFX. I can't see any reason they would do this, at least at this point, and possibly threaten the growth of the marketplace for the Helix. Maybe after they've recovered their R&D costs on the Helix if they feel there's some marketshare to be gained in the gap between the POD HD and Helix, they might consider that. But that seems like it would be at least a year away from making that kind of decision and probably well more than a year or maybe two for design and development of the new product. Even that is a pretty optimistic prediction I think. No matter what, it wouldn't expecct it to be too soon if at all.

It makes me wonder if there's not something in the global parameters area that got messed up with all the updating. Have you gone carefully through each of the screens and verified all the settings there?