mcbeddall

Another way of doing it would be to get a small vocal pedal like the voice live play from tc electronic, then all your vocal processing is separate and I think you can plug it into the 1500? It even does phantom power for condenser mics I use a firehawk fx and voicelive pedal played through my stagesource lt3 , sounds great

Double check the firmware, I've not had any issues on the new firmware, but had a few freezes in the past

All this makes me realise what I take for granted with my band, there aren't any egos knocking about and we're all after the same thing, to sound the best we can possibly sound given the time we have at sound check. If I tell the bass player to turn down ,he does, no questions asked, if he tells me to turn down, I do it straight away , I don't want to waste valuable time at soundcheck playing at the wrong volume on stage and I trust his opinion (the drummer? Not so much) There has to be a heirachy, but as stated before its always vocals first, as soon as I see a band competing with each other for volume my first thought is "noobs" Sometimes the sound guy will save them though

Less is more! I'm only allowed 3 fx blocks per patch on the firehawk but I'm yet to find a tone I couldn't create for the covers we do. When I create patches for our own material the amp tone and behaviour is always priority for me, I might have a special feature effect like an ambient delay for an intro but usually I'll have an fx block spare.

Plugging into the Aux in jack might give you the best sound because your signal won't be running through the roland modelling, you'll need an adapter to convert to mini jack The speaker might colour the sound some but as it's a modelling amp it might not be too bad, you'll have to experiment with having the speaker cab sims in the firehawk on or off (might be better with cab off) I think if you program your tones through this you might get good results, but don't program on headphones and expect it to translate well to the cube, it rarely works well that way

My band had a rehearsal Tuesday night and there was already a band in the middle room playing with the door open , we could hear them over some of our quieter songs even with our door shut , so I asked them why they had the door open and told them they'd have to shut it, their response was "we can't mate, it's hurting our ears too much with the door shut" I told him his nose was about to start bleeding

When looking for the bad frequencies to cut, a good tip is to move the looper to the front of your chain and record your guitar part, then while you loop it you can have your hands free to adjust the eq (or other settings for that matter). Turn the gain up on one of the bands and then sweep up and down the frequency range , when you hear something that sounds especially harsh or just not musical sounding that's where your cut needs to be so then lower the gain to something between -4 and -2 dB

Have a look at this video it helped me to understand how cutting certain frequencies can really improve the tone

Just download the Asio driver from line 6 Install it and select the firehawk from the list of devices in your DAW

When I started out with it I found my live tones going through a stagesource lt3 hard to tame , harsh high frequencies and booming low frequencies were to blame, (I too was incredibly frustrated at this , I mean I was running a variax guitar into the firehawk and out to a stagesource speaker, so I fully expected them to play nice straight out of the box, in contrast I found most of the presets didn't sound good and only about 6 or 7 sounded like they could be a good starting point to build a tone) However what kept me going was that most of my playing at home was through headphones and the sounds were astounding and inspirational once I started dialling my own patches, so I knew the sounds were in there I just needed to get them working live, with perseverance and a lot of help from guys on this forum I feel like I'm very close to getting all my sounds exactly where I want them. In the end I put a lot of my struggle down to inexperience and lack of understanding of certain aspects but the work for me was worth it I find the firehawk much easier than the hd500 to dial in but yes it still takes work, I'm yet to find a modeller that didn't take work to get it right though

I'm in a similar situation to yourself in that I don't get a lot of tweaking time at gig levels but a few things that have helped me are; A good quality pair of studio headphones , open backed if noise leaking isn't a problem, this gives you a bigger sound stage and therefore is a little more speaker like If I make a patch on headphones I'll put a "H" in the name so I know it's likely to need tweaking for live use and it won't be a nasty surprise when I need it I'll then take that patch and make 2 versions, one with a brighter eq and another with darker eq , at rehearsal I can try all 3 in seconds and see which is closest to the sound I want, over time you will learn which way you need to lean with the eq when your creating your patches I also put a notepad in my guitar case and make notes between songs like " patch 2b needs to be louder but less harsh" It helps to keep a tab on where I'm at with building the patches and week by week they get closer and closer to ideal

If you want to try one last thing search for "Paul hindmarsh" in the tone search He has some marshall and mesa tones that sound really direct and punchy I've had to program all my own patches pretty much from scratch , I could find tones that were OK but nothing that really blew me away, after spending quite a bit of time with it I now have some patches that DO blow me away but like you it wasn't a plug and play experience for me either

Headphones will pronounce different frequencies even just due to the fact that they're attached to your head If headphones are a must then good quality open backed studio monitor headphones will help reduce your tweaking time later but as always you'll get closer using gear as close as possible to what you use at gigs.

Check that your downloading the updater for Mac and not pc

I'm not familiar with the maximiser but I had the problem you describe with the vintage amps (marshall, vox etc) turning up the presence solved most of it Try running the firehawk output at 50% and turn up your speakers a little Another thing to check is when you push the volume wheel in and the led's turn white have that at half way as well You can push those up for more volume later but seeing as volume isn't your problem at present I'd keep them down to rule out the possibility that your running into the speakers too hot The white led volume does seem to affect tone in a bad way when it's up quite high As always double check your output mode is set to "line" and not "amp"

OK so I just had a play with that tone and the first bit of bad news is that it actually sounded ok to me , not dull at least, in fact it was a bit brighter than what I would normally go for The only way I could get it sounding the way you describe was by reducing my tone pot on the guitar but you say you have 2 guitars so I'm guessing you've tried both and different cables I'm using a variax on the les paul model so obviously our different guitars are going to give us completely different results but in case it's any kind of help I altered the tone to try and improve it slightly as it sounds on my gear and I uploaded it as "lead the way -mcb" First thing I noticed was that your using the pod farm screamer so I changed that to the hd screamer, I found it gave slightly better articulation Then I turned the presence up to full in the amp model , it didn't introduce any harshness for me and it improved the clarity a bit so I left it there The drive on the amp seemed too high for me with my guitar, by that I mean I was able to reduce it significantly without it making hardly any difference to the amount of distortion I was getting on the tone and that helped clear things up quite a bit I cut a few problem frequencies in the eq as I was getting an underlying fizzy noise and I dropped the low end cut a bit lower to about 100 hz as I wasn't getting enough low end I lowered the reflections on the cab as I find that while it sounds nice in headphones once amplified it only clutters things up Same with the reverb , hall is nice in headphones but amplified I find the room reverb keeps things tight Try out the patch and see what you think, if there's no improvement to your ear then maybe try a lower volume through your speakers , I wonder if you could be pushing them too hard perhaps

OK cool I found the patch and I'll try it out when I get back from work What kind of guitar and pickups are you using?

Nice one smithy Why did it get deleted ? Couldn't they have just removed the offensive parts? It was one of the most helpful threads I've ever read, I was thinking they should have condensed it and pinned it

Heavy? Really? I have to double check its in the case sometimes when leaving rehearsal as when I pick it up the case feels empty I've never weighed it but it can't be more than 3 bags of sugar

I use it on a few patches and never had a problem, I was also wary of it causing crashes which is why I only used it when I really needed the extra fx block The way I eased my worries was the line of thought that the firehawk hasn't been hacked or anything so really the only place this tone could have originated from is line 6, I spoke with the guy who posted the tone to the cloud and he has no idea how it got the extra fx block

I run into a stagesource lt3 speaker and sometimes studio monitors for recording, if you upload one of your tones I'll check it out and see if it's woolly for me. A tip I learned recently has really opened up a lot of the amp models for me, basically just start with your presence up full and then adjust the amps bass/middle/treble to suit, works stunningly well with the older amps (almost like that's the way it was always meant to be) I have no problems with dullness or woolly sounding tones unless that's what I'm aiming for

Did you try the factory reset?

http://line6.com/support/manuals/firehawkfx That's where you'll find the manual

http://line6.com/software/index.html That's where you'll find the updater

OK first off, your experience seems out of the ordinary , upon initial power up you should have been presented with bank 1 patch 1a and have been able to play and switch patches , bank up, bank down as you'd probably expect , so you definitely have a problem there, if the unit was meant to be brand new I'd probably return it as you have no idea what's caused the issue and it's possible that even if you get it working it could be a problem that might return later down the line That being said it's always worth doing a factory reset and reinstalling the firmware, you can find the instructions on this site You will need to download the line 6 updater for the firehawk and perform the update through a pc or laptop Don't be tempted to do it through the app even if you get it working as it can take hours to do it over bluetooth Copied from the manual; Factory Reset & Pedal Calibration Performing a Factory Reset restores the Firehawk FX to the original factory settings and Presets. Be sure to use the Firehawk Remote app to back up your customized Presets before performing a Factory Reset! After performing a Factory Reset, it is recommended that you next perform the Pedal Calibration for proper Pedal operation. • Factory Reset: Simultaneously press and hold the Master Volume Knob and the TAP footswitch as you power on the unit.