kronda

and with respect I totally disagree.  The POD sounds as good live as you make it.  If it doesn't, look in the mirror for the solution.  It is a serious piece of gear that takes time to learn and use to its full capabilities.  It was designed and built that way on purpose for those that wanted a professional level modeler for live  and studio work.  there are a lot of levels to it and some really deep editing features.  You can't just turn it on and be good to go.  

 

If you just want a plug and play unit you should look at the rest of the line such as AMPLIFi or Firehawk FX.  There is no need to dumb down the HD series...

I agree it has it all in it. The whole point of this discussion and my idea on IdeaScale is that it requires a lot of effort, time and knowledge and in the end we're all struggling and use sub-optimal patches because we don't have the best knowledge. And Line6 are in the best position to come up with the best possible settings which would more or less suite anybody.

There's no magic bullet Line 6 could implement to give you great live tone in an instant through an amp. Whatever amp you plug into will have different tonal characteristics. The easiest way to get consistently good live tone is to create patches through the same system you're playing through live, or if you're going direct, to use great full frequency, flat response monitors while making your patches.

I explain on IdeaScale that I mean going straight into the mixer and then flat-response PA. I strongly disagree that this cannot be done. Flat-response means it's more or less the same everywhere (sure the room has some effect but that is the same if you bring an amp, so it's irrelevant in this discussion) and so the only parameter should be volume. And from a gig-attending listener the volume should always be pretty much the same - pretty loud. So there is basically no variable left except for the taste of an individual guitarist. Well, that's why we have a bunch of amp models in POD HD, everyone can choose their favourite.

I make my patches on a PA in our rehearsal room at a volume which I think should match a gig. I'm getting better and better but I had to learn a lot during the process of tuning my patches and this knowledge is already present in Line6. Just use it...

Thanks for your response but I consider it off-topic.

Thanks but the idea is that it should be easier than that. If you take a decent real amp, set all controls at noon, plug in a decent guitar and start playing at a gig volume along with drums, you instantly get a usable tone. I think it should be similar with POD HD, not requiring you to throw in an EQ and search for the right settings. Moreover, you now see people wasting their time tweaking deep amp/cab params, lowering input impedance, turing treble+presence to zero etc. to get rid of the thin sound which is all wrong and doesn't really help, in my opinion. If you just put an amp in your POD HD patch, it should sound ok live (with the right global settings, i.e. output mode).

If Line6 in this forum (through the hands of digital_igloo) say that they want to help promote guitar playing etc. then they should start with the live sound because that's the real guitar playing. It's awesomely great to be able to record a "loud" metal guitar at home after midnight with your headphones on (no sarcasm) but it's not the real thing. Moreover, I don't think it should be that hard to add a new output mode with a decent EQ for live use.

I'm not saying Line 6 did a bad job with POD HD, the potential in the unit is absolutely amazing but adding just a little bit more for direct live playing would mean a huge step up. And I'm absolutely sure both the engineers and business people at Line6 must have discussed this "live issue" milion times, I just cannot figure out why they decided to now allow instant live tone. Absolute mystery to me. Compared to other requests (such as global EQ) this request should be a piece of cake from the technical point of you (of course, I might be wrong here but cannot see how). It doesn't even have to be a firmware update, just tell us the settings for the upcoming global EQ which would make it sound great live...

Hi Guys,

I submitted an idea to create a new output mode which could be called "Live" or "Live Gig". It's basically to have a good live sound out of the box (which with the current Studio/Direct is absolutely not the case). If you're like me and spent a lot of time tweaking your POD (I've been playing with it for 1.5 years now and still not done) and would like to free some FX slots which are currently occupied by EQs please consider voting for it:

http://line6.ideascale.com/a/dtd/POD-HD-New-Live-Gig-Output-Mode/688489-23508

Thanks

IMHO Global should mean it's global, applying to "all" patches. I say "all" because I'd really love if it was possible to bypass it for selected setlists or patches (as I use my POD HD Pro in two bands with very different settings - one with electric guitar, the other with acoustic and vocal) but I don't expect this will be possible and I don't mind. I like the fact it's global - you can change it quickly for all patches at once. I just hope it has a quick global bypass switch in the settings so I don't have to reset the EQ settings for each of the bands.

On the other hand (opposite to what some people here say) I'm planning to use it for sound-shaping my electric guitar + amp sim tones as at the moment I use the same settings (mid-focus eq) on every patch which 1) takes up one slot in every patch 2) isn't flexible enough (the expected global EQ's lows+3 params+highs should be enough) and 3) as I'm retweaking the eq settings very often I have to go through all patches (~20 as I have a patch per song) and change the same settings 20 times.

Thank you, Line 6 guys, for listening on this one, can't wait for the update!

I use it live for vocals in my indie-pop band, Input 1 is acoustic guitar (Variax Acoustic 700 via VDI), Input 2 is Mic with SM58 on it. I use two completely separate FX paths for processing and I'm very happy with the possibilities.

In my second band (rock) where I play electric guitar and sing I would love to use it but can't because I spent all the slots and processing power on Amp/FX for the guitar. So for now I use dedicated vocal FX.

I don't use Mic input for recording, have simpler (always ready, not packed for gigs) options for recording vocals but would trust it if needed.

Hmm, my experience (using FCB1010) is that this toggling on POD HD is much better than it was previously with POD XT which understood 0-63 as OFF and 64-127 as ON. For POD XT I often had to double tap a single pedal to get what I wanted (because when another FCB switch was selected previously then it will always send a fixed value first, say ON, then OFF second, so in order to switch off you need to tap twice), now on POD HD it's perfect, only one tap all the time. Moreover, on POD HD it's possible by one FCB pedal tap to switch, say, two effects off and another two on (very useful to change the sound completely for a solo) and in my understanding this is the main reason why Line6 decided to implement it this way - you send one CC messages, say FS1, value doesn't matter, and if 4 FX are assigned to it, all of them will be toggled to the other state, doesn't matter what their current state is. In my opinion this is very clever.

That said I wouldn't mind the extra option of, say, 0=OFF, 127=ON and 1-126 TOGGLE but given the choice either ON/OFF or TOGGLE I'd take TOGGLE without thinking. Perhaps it depends on the exact MIDI footswitch you use but I'd guess Behringer FCB1010 is one of the most frequent ones (not counting Line6 footswitches).

Just my experience to make it clear it's not like everybody thinks the current functionality is broken/bad but rather very useful/clever...

I don't know anything so please take this only as my speculation but I think there will be modelpacks (either free or paid).

First, the reason for no X3 modelpack  was probably because the POD X3 line was a cumulation of years of development and HD line was already in making by the modelling engineers, nothing was being done on X3 modelling anymore. X3 was basically repackaging of XT + all modelpacks (as far as modelling goes).

Now, look at the number of bass mics in HD500/Pro. I don't believe they would model all of these for one bass amp model. There is gonna be more. The ROM certainly won't be a problem, I was amazed how many models they could add to XT since it initially shipped with 32 models, I think, and it grew to more than a hundred with modelpacks.

So I certainly expect more bass models, probably some mic pres (to utilize the XLR connector) and since this is after all mainly a guitar gear, I believe guitar players cannot be left behind.

But to be honest I don't care much for new amps, I can get all the types of sounds I need. If they only allowed to use one amp with two cabs (or even better one amp + one cab + two mics) to save DSP that would be perfect. But my main wish is multichannel recording over USB (wet and dry) and at least reamping over USB or preferably POD Farm HD. And yes, please fix some obvious shenanigans like HD Edit tempo bugs or missing clipping indicator.