cruisinon2

Lol, the hairdryer is a new one for me. If they were those plastic Fender-style Strat knobs, I suppose that might help make the knob itself a bit more pliable, but I doubt it's gonna accomplish much with these knurled metal knobs...but who knows? Stranger things have happened.

Then count your blessings, cause yours isn't plinking much. The worst examples are rather grotesque and unusable. Sounds clips are scattered throughout this Biblical length thread...

Well at this point it doesn't much matter if it's caused by the hole in the ozone, termites, or HPV. The bean counters have run up the white flag and proudly declared defeat. The only thing that would have made it funnier would have been if the announcement had come on Bastille Day. Game over, thanks for playing....

You asked for gear that will allow you to play at home without lugging the Alto around...and you specifically asked about headphones, yet somehow they're suddenly a bad idea. So what are you looking for? You also answered your own question. Its only stereo if you're using stereo effects. A mono patch with everything panned up the middle in the mixer block merely sends the same signal to both sides. Just because you're listening on both sides of your head, doesn't make it "stereo". So, no...headphones will not make it difficult to make patches for a PA. It's either that, or a pair of studio monitors...either option is as close as you're gonna get without buying another Alto, or something similar. Reasonably flat-response headphones will get you very close to a reasonably flat-response PA. I've been doing exactly that for several years now. NOTHING, however will be identical to the Alto...not even another Alto, necessarily. There are always differences, and greater or lesser degrees of compromise.

AKG240S headphones. Studio mainstay for decades...~$80. You're welcome. ;) However, don't assume that they will sound identical to the Alto. They won't. Nothing will. They will however, keep you in the ballpark...

Actually the funniest part of all this is the nearly 4 month old post that's been resurrected from a dead and bloated thread. Trolling or not, the guy hasn't been back since April. Odds are he ain't seeing any of this...

Lotta knobs are on a little tight initially...but it can be done. Gotta get under it with something and GENTLY work your way around the knob prying it up a little at a time. Use a flat head screwdriver with a rag under it so you don't mangle the pickguard. Go slow, and don't be a maniac. It's not a crowbar, and you're not trying to lift a truck off an old lady. Took all mine off (on this and a million other guitars) to swap out the pickguard. Had zero problems.

No, you're not paranoid...and rightly concerned. A power amp and cabinet have a very different frequency response compared to a PA. Patches created with a traditional guitar amp are likely to sound VERY different through a PA...boomy and/or harsh and brittle, due to a much flatter and broader frequency response. You have to tweak your patches through whatever you intend to use live, or something as similar as you can get in terms of frequency response. Otherwise you're likely to have issues. There are a ton of FRFR speaker options now, ranging in price from quite reasonable to the absurd...there are more than a few threads around here that discuss them at length. A decent pair of studio monitors, or flat-response studio headphones are other options for playing at home and creating your tones...but trying to bounce from guitar amp to PA and back again, is gonna be a disaster...trust me.

I have to realize?!?!?!?! Are you serious? I've been saying the same friggin' thing...repeatedly...since the discussion began: #1: Variety of causes #2: Varying degrees of severity #3: User-specific tone/technique/etc that either amplifies OR masks, a problem guitar. And in the case of the latter, it's a "problem" unit that will never be identified as such, because the owner won't hear anything amiss. If you're a jazz guy, playing with a crystal clean and somewhat "dead" tone all day, you'll probably never hear the plink. In the end though, not enough people b1tching = no action. That's how the warranty/recall/redesign business works. Only when the cost of NOT doing anything eclipses the cost of addressing the problem, will something actually get done. A small percentage of lemons (and the forever alienated owners thereof) is just "the cost of doing business".

Sure they could...but probably won't. You'll have better luck calling up the NSA and asking for a tour of the grounds.

I understand curiosity for curiosity's sake....but that aside, what would one do with this information?

There are factory presets? I thought it was a sound library of whale song and chainsaws...;)

Well its not really a matter of the settings being "correct" or not...if you like the sound you get, and nothing is clipping, then it really doesn't matter whether input 2 is set to "same", or something else. Does it affect the input level and the tone...yes, to varying degrees depending on the amp model, the guitar you're using, etc, but I've never once asked myself, "Is this patch set up correctly?"...if I like the way it sounds, and it does what I need it to do, then it's "correct".

Though far from surprising... Obviously there aren't enough units affected to bother devoting resources to the problem. "Money, it's a crime..."

And there we have it...oh well, lol. Guess we can finally "Old Yeller" this thread...

It's always better to record as dry as possible, but depending on how much compression you've got going on, removing it might affect your tone considerably, and likely your performance along with it. Ditto for the EQ.

Agreed...fret buzz can usually be cured by any or all of the above. Bringing out the files is only necessary in cases of poorly seated (usually high), or badly worn frets. I'm comfortable doing just about anything to my guitars. I'll install pickups, adjust the truss rod, action, intonation...hell I've even done the old Dan Erlewine "bone dust and crazy glue" to fill/re-cut an old nut slot (as a temporary fix). But I don't touch the frets...don't have the tools, or the patience.

I'm the farthest thing in the world from an IT guy, but it seems more like a computer horsepower issue, than anything else...you've got audio and video bouncing around at once. How much RAM is it sporting?

If the amp has no FX loop, you're always gonna have problems with certain FX. Some things just work better after the pre-amp, such as reverbs and delays. While others like overdrives, distortion boxes, and compressors are generally better out in front. So while you should be able to disable the cab/mic models and use only the FX in the Firehawk (never used one, but since you can do exactly that on most other L6 stuff, I don't see why they'd have removed that option from this unit, but post this over at the Firehawk forum to be sure), having all your FX running straight into the front of the amp may still give you some grief, depending on what you're using at any given time. Nothing is truly transparent...the more stuff you do to the signal before it hits the amp, the messier (and noisier) things tend to get.

Amen. Why but a modeler if you only want one sound?

Fair enough...and in this case I'm happy to be wrong, because it actually proves my point. This is yet more evidence that the "fix" is different from one intstrument to the next, as others have clearly expressed that swapping the leads only moves the problem to another string. The idea that this is ever gonna be resolved via a firmware update is a fantasy as far as I'm concerned. It just ain't that simple.

Well that's ridiculous. It's still a guitar. The same things that cause fret buzz on every other guitar on earth, will cause it on a Variax...and the solution(s) are identical. I can understand them not wanting to mess around with the electronics if they're unfamiliar with them, but a set-up is a set-up. And I'd be careful about leveling your own frets if you are not experienced at doing so...it's very easy to do irreparable damage to both the frets and the fingerboard itself, and you could easily wind up with far bigger problems than you'vw already got, like a $1K pile of firewood...

When you cut the volume on what? The only way you could possibly be losing gain or distortion, is if you're rolling off either the guitar's volume knob, or the "drive" level of whatever amp model you're using. Neither the channel volume of the patch, nor the POD's master volume have anything to do with the amount of gain/distortion in your tone.

Swapping the leads doesn't get rid of the plink, it just relocates it to another string. If moving a couple of wires was the solution, this thread wouldn't be years old. I'll just keep saying it...there is no universal solution. People have offered everything from bubble-wrapping everything that could conceivably vibrate, to grinding metal from the saddles. It's a combination of factors, that aren't necessarily gonna be the same from one guitar to the next. If there were one thing, somebody would have figured it out already, we wouldn't have been having the same conversation for years on end.

None of them are immune, but it's got nothing whatsoever to do with what kind of mag pickups the guitar has, which is the only difference between the 69/69S, and 59/59P. It's a piezo/modeling problem, and that's the same on all of 'em. Some suffer from it, some don't...it's the luck of the draw. Anticipating a problem is pointless. You don't even have the thing yet...plenty of them work just fine.