alienux

I didn't get to listen to all of them yet, but the first one definitely has some parts that remind me of early David Gilmour. Very nice!

I have a 500X, but I would have bought the 500 if I hadn't gotten such a good deal. I got my 500X for $395 on amazon.com in early April. If it hadn't been on sale, I would have probably just went with a 500. It's back up to $499 now, but there are a couple of Amazon marketplace sellers listing it at $419.

I just gave it a quick listen. Some really good sounding stuff, and the "Early Beginnings" has a really nice Vai type of vibe going on.

No, and in fact, even though I read this thread the first day it was posted, I didn't realize it wasn't about trouble in Florida until I read your response.

I use a free iphone app called PanoTuner, which is always spot on, and the few times I've used my POD tuner, it matched my tuning from the app.

Thankfully I've never had it happen to me when using my foot on the switch (so far, and hopefully won't), just when I was sitting on the floor and changing with my fingers. But it still only happened with FS2, and it's never consistent even with identical pressure when pressing the switch.

I had been wondering about the same thing, but didn't think to ask. Good info to have. I generally don't mess with the system settings much, so it's not a big deal to me that they can't be modified in Edit. I actually go back and forth between editing on the POD itself and editing in Edit, but never during the same session. I probably use the POD controls most of the time because I don't always feel like hooking up to the computer for minor edits. But, when I know I'm going to spend some time doing more detailed editing, I use the Edit software.

I'm one of 2 lead guitar players in a church worship band (we generally alternate weeks). On the topic of using my own tone vs. copying tones from the original recordings, I'm somewhere in between, but lean closer to using my own tone. What I do is create several tones of my own that I really like, from crispy clean to high gain, and use those as my base sounds. I generally stick to those tones that I've created and use the appropriate patch for gain level, although sometimes I'll use a light gain instead of clean or something like that. Then, when a song has a specific ambient effect or timing effect(s), I'll try to match the ambiance or timing effect as much as I can, but using my own tone as a the base tone. For example, we recently played All The People Said Amen by Matt Maher. I created a patch with my own new clean tone (using the Tweed B-Man), and assigned a low res delay to FS4. The low res delay is set to have a single repeat using 1/16 notes and tap tempo (I just hit the tap tempo switch when the drummer clicks in at the beginning). Then I added a colordrive pedal with medium gain and also assigned it to FS4, but set it up so that when I turn off the delay, the color drive kicks in. This way I get the nice clean repeated notes for the intro and first verse, and a good medium gain sound when the song's chorus kicks in. Here's the original Maher song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhfPLYVZ5j0 Here's the patch I created: http://line6.com/customtone/tone/343328/ Here's a clip of us playing that song (it's a house recording, so you won't hear much bass or room ambiance, but you'll get the idea of the guitar tone/effects): http://www.mediafire.com/listen/3nw8w4exatd3elp/AllThePeopleSaidAmenClip.wav So I get my own tone without copying the song exactly, but still get the feel of the song.

Thanks and no problem, glad to share it :) The funny thing is that I downloaded the "official" Lincoln Brewster patch from his site and was going to use it, and I didn't like how it sounded at all. It was too muddy sounding, and almost too overbearing. I messed around with this one until I got it where I liked it and I've been using it since.

Sure. It's based on a tone I downloaded from CustomeTone (don't remember which one), but I added a lot more mids, lowered the treble and bass, and lowered the presence. I also added a booster. I uploaded it and it is here: http://line6.com/customtone/tone/341558/

I can't give you a specific amp or effect suggestion, because that really comes down to preference and what you want. But what you described regarding sounding good at home but disappearing in a mix is fairly common, and is generally caused by a couple of things. One being too much treble and bass and not nearly enough mids, and the other being too much gain for high gain tones. The guitar's voice is in the mid range, and a really great crunchy sounding tone at home that has low mids, will completely disappear when used in a mix with a band. You really need to emphasize the mids and de-emphasize the bass and treble, or else you're competing with the bass guitar and the keyboards, and the guitar gets lost. Increased mids, with decreased highs and lows, helps the guitar cut through and keeps the bass/keyboard ranges from being in competition. When you set your tone up correctly for a live mix, it will sound nasally to you, so you may want to have one preset for practicing at home, and a different one for playing live. It's also common to get a good distorted tone at home and then sound thin and weak with it live. Too much gain thins out the sound. And, when you play at higher volumes in a live setting, the distortion will naturally become heavier without needing the amp gain up as much as you would use at lower volumes.

That was my thought. If this is pretty typical, and since the rest of my POD works fine, I wouldn't want to exchange it for one that very likely could have the same problem or maybe some other issue. So my main question was whether this is pretty normal for the 500X. At least I know now that someone else has had a similar issue, even if rare.

Good point about changing it to 1/2 speed first. I hadn't thought of that.

I noticed the other day that on my POD HD500X, which I just bought in April, that the FS2 switch didn't change a couple of times when I pressed it. This was when I was sitting on the floor using my hands as I was using HD500X Edit with my laptop, so it wasn't when I used my foot. The way the footswitches are designed, they click, and then there is still some small distance that they travel downward before they stop. So there is by design a little play between the click point and the stop point. On that one footswitch, I tried pressing it with different amounts of pressure. On all of the other 7 footswitches, the red light changes the very instant that the "click" happens, even if I don't completely push the footswitch all of the way down. On FS2, the red light doesn't always change when the click occurs. I have to press it all of the way down sometimes, while at other times it DOES change right at the point of the click. Now this may seem trivial, and it may be, but I'm asking simply because 1 of 8 footswitches is behaving slightly differently. I think when using my foot I will always use enough pressure to change it, but if this is something that is not normal and could get worse so that it does become a problem, I'd like to know so I can address it. And since it's brand new, I want to make sure that even the slightest thing isn't working incorrectly. So, those of you with a 500X, do you notice the same thing and is this somewhat normal, or do all of the footswitches change exactly at the click rather than when the switch is pressed completely down all of the way?

Yeah, this is the one thing that I've been disappointed in with my HD500X. I have a Peavey Vypyr II that has a 30 second looper that is actually 30 seconds. I was excited to have a 48 second looper and wasn't thrilled to find out that it's really only 24 seconds. I don't use a looper often, so it's not a huge deal, but it was kind of misleading.

Don't know if this thread will help, but it might be worth looking it. It suggests that this could be either a driver or a memory problem: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/41951-63-kmode_exception_not_handled I found another page on the official Microsoft site that suggests it could be virus related: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/294728 I'd first lean toward the driver issue. Maybe remove and re-install the POD drivers on your system to start with. It should run fine in Win 8.1. Mine works fine in Win 8.1 x64 with all current updates.

Have you opened a ticket with them?

Are you asking if those extra 3 setlists are already on the POD, or are you asking if you can send them to the POD?

I uploaded some sample clips to show the difference in tone. The first is my Vypyr mic'd, but at a low level (below 1 on the master volume because anything higher overpowered the stage). The second is with the HD500X. Two different songs, but it shows the difference in tone I achieved by using the POD. I'll still be tweaking the POD for awhile, but I'm really, really happy with this is a starting point. And granted, these are house recordings, so they don't really portray the actual room sound, but they're enough to show the difference in tone. http://www.mediafire.com/listen/v50gnhi2lguinlo/WeWillHoldOnSoloExcerpt.mp3 http://www.mediafire.com/listen/hpd14maygnwiphb/PraisesRingSoloExcerpt.mp3

Close, it's actually a Model 2. I bought it new somewhere around 1986 or 1987 for something like $420 to $450. I was 15 and had a cheap Bentley electric, and I saved my money up for a long time to get the Charvel. I went to the music store a couple of times a week just to look at it until I had enough saved up. Then one day it was on sale, and the guy working knew how long I'd been looking at it, so he knocked off another $50 so I could go ahead and take it home. It still plays great to this day.

That sounds really nice. I've heard of one other player who had his amp mic'd backstage during church services, but I never knew how they had all of the cabling worked out. The place you described sounds like they really care about getting things done right.

Yeah, I did make a shield from some old kick drum shields we had laying around (pic below), and it helped quite a bit with the beaming, but I still couldn't get it as loud as I would have liked to. Not quite an isolation box, but still helpful considering what I had to use at the time. The other thing I'm excited about is that even though I took the Crate PA and speaker this time, in the future I'll only need to carry my guitar and POD with me.

So I've had my HD500X for a little over a month now and I spent quite a bit of time, of course, creating usable tones that I like. I've used the POD with headphones, computer speakers, my Vypyr VIP 2 amp, and more recently, and old Crate PA/Mixer system that my parents used to use years ago and have now given to me. The Crate PA system really brought the tone to life and allowed me to get the tones dialed in the way I like them before using the POD live (although my wife wasn't happy about how much space it takes up :D ). I have to say that with the HD500X, my tone was the best it's been since I was much younger and used to use a Crate G120C amp when playing live. I play lead guitar at church, and I've been using my Peavey Vypyr VIP 2 amp with a Sure SM57. I love the Vypyr amp, and with the SM57 off-axis, I was able to get some decent tones live, but the problem is that the stage volume became an issue. The Vypyr doesn't have a line out, so I had to mic it, which would normally be fine, but In the church setting, if I turned the amp up loud enough to get a good fat mic'd tone, it would overpower the bass and keyboard players because of speaker beaming, and be overpowering in general for a church service. If I turned it down to keep that from happening, I'd end up with a good, albeit quieter, tone on stage, but the mic'd sound coming out of the PA was thin and weak because of not having enough volume for the mic to pick up a good source sound. So after tweaking and learning the POD for a month, I used it at practice and during the performances this past weekend. It made a huge difference in my sound. No longer having to worry about being too loud or too soft was great, and the tone I got through the PA system was the best I've had playing here. I used my Crate PA system and one of it's 2x8 speakers as a monitor, and placed it in front of me pointing away from the audience but toward my ears so that I could hear it pretty well without it being too loud. All in all, it's been a great experience and I'm pretty excited about using it from here on out.

Unfortunately for a young me (14 at the time), I had no idea how to use the effects loop on my Crate G120C. I used that amp for over 15 years before getting another one and learning what the loop was really for.

I've always put reverb last in my chain. I guess it comes from having used real amps with built in reverb, but putting pedals in front of the amp. My normal signal chain before modelers was always guitar-pedals-amp w/reverb (and hence reverb last), so that's what I've always set my modeling up to follow. Edit: I do, however, now put timing affects after the amp in the signal chain on both my Vypyr VIP 2 and on my POD HD500X, but still end with reverb.