cruisinon2

I don't want to rain on your parade, but this approach is never gonna work. I tried it myself, and all I got was a headache. Almost gave up and sold the 500X after a couple of weeks, because I was getting nowhere. You can spend the next six months downloading every single thing on Customtone and auditioning them with your rig, and still find nothing usable. Why? Because any patch (don't care what style of music were talking about) that someone else dials in with their guitar, their amp, their cabinet, string gauge, playing style, etc. etc, is simply not going to sound the same when you get your hands on it. Were they playing at bedroom volume, or loud enough to melt concrete? What kind of room were they in when they did it? Hardwood floors, or a treble sucking environment with a big fluffy couch and 70's shag carpet? Were they playing through an amp at all, or using full models with mic and cab sims into headphones, or a recording desk and listening through studio monitors? The list of variables is of Biblical length...and trying to reproduce it on your end is next to impossible. Starting from scratch, or taking a tone that sounds good in the headphones and painstakingly tweaking it until it suits your rig is really the only method that produces any results. It's not impossible, but it's also not easy, and tends to be time consuming.

Well there ya go, lol. At least I'm not nuts... :P

It would only have one word in it..."faster". ;)

Isn't that backwards? Or are we just getting confused by a bunch of adjectives? If I turn the SAG # up, that's when the "mushiness" shows up, pick attack starts to get lost, etc...turning it down gives me a sound that I would describe as "tighter". Maybe it's me...

There's never enough gain, man!!! :P I want pickups that are so hot, they could power a small city...then just melt after one tune... :lol:

Yeah...it's nearly impossible to "un-metal" the Treadplate amp, lol. Easier to use some combo of distortion/drive pedals to push a mid-gain amp, then either toggle them off, or roll off volume (or both) to clean up the tone a bit. Or, you could try assigning the drive to the expression pedal and back that off some. That plus a volume roll off might give you the sound you're looking for. But, I've found that that seems to mess with the overall volume of the patch sometimes...not my preferred method.

There is no "right" way to do it, but "always" sticking to any one setting(s) might be part of the problem. Playing around with the deep edit parameters can make a substantial difference in how things sound. Any one setting might work for one amp model but not necessarily the next. If you're not happy with what you're getting, you need to experiment...try another amp, different distortion pedal, EQs, etc...the combinations are almost endless. It'll take a while, but when you nail it, you'll know.

Wake me when there's a generation of modelers that'll play the notes for me too. And I expect it to sound just like me, only better... :P

Lmao...

No, no...you mentioned using a Mesa cabinet. You need something to drive it, but that has nothing to do with recording direct to a DAW. Two completely separate tasks...

Well either way you go, you need power. Neither the 500X nor the Pro X have a power section, so just plugging them straight into a cabinet isn't going help you. You need either a dedicated power amp, or slave the power section of a head to drive the Mesa cab. You could also run straight into either the front end, or FX loop of a combo amp. The alternative is to run direct to a PA or some sort of powered speaker(s) using the amp/cab sims in either unit.

I have no experience with it whatsoever, and perhaps it works flawlessly, but I'm not sure I would be willing to trust it 100% of the time. Having control over what gets toggled on and off seems rather important, lol. I can see that ending in a train wreck very quickly...you can assign multiple FX to the same footswitch on the 500X, so if you want to be able to toggle multiple things on and off simultaneously, you don't really have to do that much tap dancing anyway.

"Have a beer...don't cost nothin' "... Everything in Customtone can be had for the bargain-basement price of nothing...unfortunately, that's precisely what most of them are worth. You will likely have to go through dozens of downloads before finding even one tone that you'll find useful, and even then it will still probably require some tweaking. I tried it at first, and found it to be largely a waste of time...a good idea on paper, but one that doesn't translate particularly well into reality. Others will probably disagree, but that has been my experience. There are simply too many variables involved to expect a patch to sound the same from one user to the next (guitar, pickups, string gauge, playing style, was he listening through headphones?, through and amp?...if so, which one? at what volume?...the list goes on). The 500X is not a "plug and play" unit, and typically has a rather long learning curve, perhaps more so if you're not accustomed to working with amp modelers. That said, it is an amazing piece of gear, and I'm happier with my rig now than with anything I've owned in many years...but it didn't happen overnight.

Seriously? Do you just assume that anything you read here was written by an idiot? There would be no earthly reason to try and A/B dead vs. new strings, no matter what kind the are...so no, that's not what I meant. As I said before, there are two distinct things being discussed here: 1)string longevity, and 2) what one type of string may or may not contribute to how well the modeling works. There was nothing ambiguous about anything I said. Not going to debate it anymore, because it's a waste of time. You win. I'm gonna go try and learn what dead strings sounds like now...seems I'm just ig'nant.

I ask my wife that question, and I'll never play again...I'd wake up with no hands, lol.

May not mean anything, but lately I've seen more complaints about low E string piezo "plink" on the 89's than anything else. The biggest differences between the models are the necks. If it were me, I'd be making my decision based mostly on what I thought I'd be comfortable with. Realistically, the odds of getting a lemon are probably the same no matter what you choose.

Yeah, not sure I buy it, lol. No outdoor gigs with 7's...a stiff breeze will snap them.

I'm gonna file this one under " just because you can, doesn't mean you should"...lol I'd also be willing to bet that if you're not constantly wiping off the fingerprints, eventually the acids will eat into the thing and you'll never get them off.

Then why all the debate over 'brightness' then?Regular strings vs. coated, flat-rounds vs. half-rounds? Last time I checked, brightness, or the lack thereof was certainly a component of one's tone. Then there's Elixer's own advertising blurbs about one having a 'warm tone' vs 'bright and lively' for the other...On we go to the marathon discussion above about the the piezos and how much of a difference the strings make with respect to the modeling. String life is only half of this discussion...the rest is most certainly about tone, and what does or doesn't affect the quality of the modeling.

I threw a set of the Nanowebs (as they don't seem to offer the Polywebs in 11's) on just out of curiosity...and reached the same conclusion I did the last time I tried them about 15 years ago. Didn't really notice any appreciable difference in tone, certainly nothing to justify spending more than 2x the $$ on a set. Put a couple of hours of playing on them at home, then gigged with them last night. We'll see how long they last. Something tells me I'll be going back to my D'Addario balanced tension 11's.

Can 8's actually be seen by the naked eye?

Factory presets are almost entirely useless anyway...I've heard more pleasing sounds from a wood chipper. Try setting up some patches from scratch, as long as you get sound out of those, then everything is fine.

A week, really? Can't say my experience has been the same...by the time a week has passed, I've played a set of strings to death and changed 'em again. Axe looks beautiful tho, enjoy!

Ah quality control...how do I love thee, let me count the ways.

I don't care for the new Strat model either, but I liked the rest. Somewhere on here there are some custom models that somebody created, and got REALLY close to the older Strat model, I use those now and I'm quite happy...search around and you'll find the thread, I just don't remember how far back it was.