cruisinon2

Blame it on Fletcher and Munson. Adding volume will always have some effect on your overall perception of sound. There's no escaping it. A patch at bedroom volume is never going to sound the same at stage volume.

It's a psych experiment...

You got it...and the guitar is just one variable. Patches can't just be swapped like baseball cards and be expected to yield identical results. It would be nice, and I'd be thrilled beyond description if I woke up tomorrow in a universe that was that orderly, but it ain't happening. Too many variables.

You may love the neck, some do...but as nice as those pics are that Sweetwater gives you, you won't know anything till its in your hands. Hell, it's a pic on a computer monitor...the color is even debatable until you're staring at it in person. Just one of the innumerable joys of mail-order guitar shopping.

Forget PODs (of which I've had 3)...of the countless pieces of gear I've owned over the years, I've yet to have a single power switch on anything crap out. I wouldn't smack them with a hammer, but that aside, I really don't think they're all that fragile.

We could call it a lot of things (some of which would be more polite than others), but a "feature" it's NOT. "Defect" is more like it. Strings are never supposed to rattle around in the nut slot.

The 89's PROFILE is narrow...but that's not the problem, and it's not what we're talking about. The 69 had a 41mm nut width, which is smaller than just about anything else you could grab off the wall at your local MegaloMusic. The resulting string spacing is rather claustrophobic, for lack of a better term, and imho contributes to the string slippage issues that so many have had. In the attempt to have a more normal string-to-string spacing (which didn't work anyway...can't put a size 10 foot in a size 9 shoe, unless you don't care about your toes) it requires pushing the two E strings way too close to the edge of the frets, hence the ease with which they get dumped overboard.

Not me. To me it's like dialing in a sound just the way you like it, then leaning a mattress in front of the amp and trying to cut through the mix.

Or you could find yourself needlessly handcuffed by a comically narrow nut width that hasn't been seen on a production guitar since the 50's. Simple open position chords were infuriating. Thought I was having a stroke... ;) But as always, your mileage may vary.

Fair enough. I did not bother with the new presets, and I don't intend to. I kept everything when I installed the new firmware. It's taken me more than a year to get to where I am with the POD, and I'm quite happy with the results. No point in rocking the boat, deleting set-lists and re-installing bundles. This stuff has enough quirks as it is...

You answered your own question. They can re-work the presets from now till Doomsday and it won't matter. What they sound like to whomever crafts them ain't what they're gonna sound like in your hands, or mine, or anyone else's. Just because you stick me behind the wheel of Jeff Gordon's car, doesn't mean I can drive like that...

On a long enough timeline, we will all have gov't issued, coin-operated toilets in our homes.

1. The whole time. 2. Yes.

If you like the neck, just get it re-fretted.

Yes, but out there in nature, no energy is spent on adaptations for which there is no net gain. Last time I checked, Darwin didn't have anything to say about boredom being the driving force for evolution...

It's quarter past "time to mess with the status quo, just for the sake of changing something".... But really why all the fuss? Just tilt your head 12 degrees to the right...no worries, it only hurts for a few minutes, then it'll turn numb. :angry:

I actually twitched a little when I read that...you're a better man than I, lol.

So they're a giant wallet...awesome! ;)

When you want to use it as volume pedal... for volume swells, or to roll off a little of the guitar's volume to clean the sound up a bit...those are the things that the good old fashioned volume pedals are designed to do. You want a boost, which is fine...and that's what you get when you assign the exp pedal to the channel volume, but you're not using the modeled "volume pedal" in that case. What you're really doing is just using the exp pedal to boost your overall volume...you couldn't do that with an analog volume pedal.

Customtone is a nice idea...but one that translates poorly into reality. You cannot really expect anyone else's settings to sound identicle on your amp, as there are too many variables involved...different guitars, string gauges, playing technique, the room the person was sitting in when they dialed in the tone. All of these things contribute to one's sound. Even two of the same amp sitting next to each other with the same settings are likely to have some degree of tonal difference. Translating it to another player, with a different guitar, in a different environment will never result in identicle sounds...it just isn't gonna happen. Also, youtube clips are not a reliable means of tone-matching...there's no telling how the clip was recorded, as that will introduce yet another set of variables that will color the sound. Your best bet is to experiement and find the sound you're looking for...otherwise you'll spend the rest of your life trying to match somebody else's tone, and never really get there.

Those pulls are definitely different than what I had...but the pull itself really isn't the issue. The part you actually grab could be a paper clip, as long as it stayed on...it's the part that the pull hooks onto that snapped off (for 2 of them), and for the others, there was too big a gap between the hook and the body of the zipper itself, so they just kept falling off. Perhaps yours are better...

It depends on exactly what you want to do...if you just want volume swells, then as you said it would go first in the chain. You'll get the same effect as if you were manually riding the guitar's volume knob. Assigning the expression pedal to the amp's channel volume is basically like riding an amp's master volume...doesn't really give you the same effect as a traditional volume swell. However, it is useful for dual amp patches, where you have 2 very different tones (clean and dirty, for example) that you want to morph between without having to deal with the slight delay that accompanies switching patches. I have several patches set up this way...makes for seemless transitions between tones. Great for live use.

"Bad piezo" can mean a lot of things. What exactly was it doing (or not doing)? You mentioned all the piezos on the replacement being "even"...if your definition of "bad" means that some strings are louder than others, then you may end up swapping out guitars until the end of time. Piezo outputs are going to vary to some degree on just about all of them...that's why Workbench allows you to adjust the relative string volumes. I had to adjust string volumes on most of the models I use regularly...especially the Strats and Teles.

Actually, on the 300 acoustics, there is a knob labeled "verb". From the official blurbage: "VERB: Add some ambience to your acoustic sounds with this simple to use slider. By pushing it towards the VOL and BODY controls, you can add a sense of space without sacrificing note definition and character." Whatever that means...not a reverb in the traditional sense, but I'm assuming that's what he's talking about.

It fits...however, the zipper pulls are the worst I've ever seen. All four were gone within just a couple of weeks of use. 2 simply kept falling off...the first few times I noticed and put them back on, but they were eventually gone. And on the other two, the little hook that held the pull itself on snapped off completely. And it was not thrown around or abused...hell, I didn't have it long enough to abuse it.