BBD_123

You are entitled to your beliefs, but you are not entitled to impose them on others, especially as the only means available for you to do so is to deny the evidence and accuse Chapman of being a liar. At most, all you can say is "I believe X but I have no evidence to support that belief".

Have you set Input 1 = guitar and Input 2 = variax? If both inputs are set to guitar/same, it will cause clipping such as you can hear.

Um, er :( I suppose that if the gears turn and the piston emits puffs of steam as one plays, I might be won over... :)

@ Arislaf To avoid any unnecessary disagreement :), I'd like to re-state what I originally wrote for clarity: As far as the Gibson CS R9s go, I'd say it was the *combination* of Alnico III Custombuckers with carefully selected body timber, the long neck tenon and the absence of a resonance-damping truss rod sleeve that produces a tone like no other I have heard from a LP / dual humbucker guitar. Of course this is just IMO, not presented as a matter of fact. The key factors are, I suspect, the pickup, the fat '59 neck profile, the long neck tenon and the absence of a truss rod sleeve. Resonance from the strings can only pass into the body via the nut and the bridge, so I speculate that the *neck* is more important to final tone / sustain than often supposed. Hence the importance of the neck-to-body juncture (the long tenon) and the absence of the truss rod sleeve. This may be why bodiless instruments like the 3DP guitar and Steinbergers don't sound radically different to conventional designs. However, it *does* leave space for the choice of body wood ('tone wood') to affect the character of the instrument (see eg. the Chapman demo above). The truth may be that the choice of tone wood has less impact on the final tone than is commonly supposed, but not that it has none.

@ Arislaf So, how do we account for the clearly audible difference between the swamp ash and mahogany bodies on the Chapman demo? And in which journal did Angove publish his research results? I cannot find the study. He is quoted as saying that the research would be complete by end 2012. As it is now end 2016 I would guess that his paper did not pass peer review and therefore cannot be cited as evidence in a discussion such as this.

It's *clever* but ugly. I do not refer to the Old Glory paint job or the US-centric design concept but to the riddled, model aeroplane aesthetic of the body. Just not for me. Again, personal opinion.

From Guitar Player: The Nine Things That Guitarists Get Wrong About Guitars: Rob Chapman video demo: Proof Wood Affects Electric Guitar Tone: As far as the Gibson CS R9s go, I'd say it was the *combination* of Alnico III Custombuckers with carefully selected body timber, the long neck tenon and the absence of a resonance-damping truss rod sleeve that produces a tone like no other I have heard from a LP / dual humbucker guitar. Of course this is just IMO, not presented as a matter of fact.

Yes, it's funny how bassists seem to cope with all those extra lbs without collapsing. Clearly a hardy breed.

You can get sued big time for lying about product specifications. Gibson knows this. Yes, modern stock LPs (including the so-called Traditionals) have weight relief. No, the Custom Shop stuff doesn't because it's accurate to the reissue year spec ('57, '58, '59, '60).

The Custom Shop R9s don't have any weight relief. No holes, nothing. They are exactly the same as an actual 1959LP - solid throughout (bar the routs for the control cavity, pickups etc). The weight is kept below 9.5lb by careful selection of the timber used for the body. This was true of the originals, most of which weighed between 8.5 - 9.5lb.

No weight relief on my R9 which tips the scales at a respectable old skool 9.2lb ;)

It's the only way to do it. Once you crack this, your patch volume balance issues will go away. You do have to watch out for volume creep on the high-gain patches if you add a gain-boosting pre like an overdrive. Just keep A/B-ing with the reference clean patch to keep everything level. Remember that you can boost your reference clean patch using the Line 6 Vetta Juice just before the mixer block. See my patch example above: set Amount to 0% and Level as needed. Level: 100% = +30dB of clean gain, so there's a lot to play with. Top tip :)

Your clean amp patch volume sets the ceiling for everything else. For example, this is the loudest patch I have: http://line6.com/customtone/tone/2619386/ (Done on an HD Bean but there's a tone converter at the top of the page if it won't load on your kit.) Everything else is calibrated down to this clean patch level using Channel Volume (CH VOL). For balancing, I've found that 45% CH VOL is a good place to start with high gain amps. Hope this helps.

A big +1 there! I was about to respond to mlaptewicz' question only to discover that you just did :-) What you say is exactly correct and is the first thing that must be done. Fine-tuning volume between patches comes later. You use the Channel volume to balance the clean and overdriven amps. Typically the Ch Vol for quiet clean amps can be set to at or near 100% without making effects further down the chain clip. Try a general Ch Vol of 45% for the overdriven amps. That should get you close to patch parity volume across the board.

No, you're not stupid and yes the HD signal routing is indeed complicated. Nobody else here spotted what the problem was either, including me. This is why I kept on and on saying "go back and rebuild your patch from nothing, one block at a time" :) Anyway, got there in the end so it's all good.

That's because the problem is almost certainly with your bass preamp. You need to get it looked at or just take it out of the circuit and go passive (which is what I would do at this point btw).

I've been experimenting with the preamp on my bass using the SVT bright, SVT normal and Cougar amp models. I can make *all* of them clip unpleasantly by boosting eq alone for each pickup. Try reducing the bass, mid and treble boost on your guitar preamp and find out which of them is making the HD amp model clip. Build your tone from there.

>> But dont Believe this has to do anything with the Pod anymore so think you so much for the help! A pleasure. Good luck fixing the remaining issues - I'm sure you will sort it out eventually. One thing I might try would be to remove the battery from the guitar preamp and see if the problem goes away when you are running passive guitar electronics. It may be that your setup will not allow you to do this (no battery = no signal at all) but if you can, then see what happens.

Maybe there is some issue with the guitar preamp. Why not take it to a music shop and get it checked out? Increasing distortion when *lowering* the pickup does not sound right at all. I think it is unlikely now that the Pod is the source of the problem (now the input issue is resolved).

That's very good news. Now you've nailed the worst of the clipping you can fine-tune the amp pre gain and master volume to get rid of the rest, as bjnette suggests above. I still strongly urge you to build that fresh, single amp patch to work the bugs out of your signal chain by rebuilding it one block at a time, always keeping it clean and free of clipping. Sit down, crack a beer and spend a little time on this - treat it as fun rather than a boring job :-) And of course you should pay careful attention to your STC 3M3 preamp settings as well. Start at the very beginning of the signal chain! Often you do not want everything on the guitar preamp turned up to the max. You may need to reduce the output level a little bit and perhaps do some EQ shaping too. Watch the midrange in particular.

I recreated your clean channel (Cougar only) exactly as you have it in your patch and immediately noticed the unpleasant clipping. I got rid of the clipping by setting the INPUT 1 SOURCE to [Guitar] and [Aux] not [Guitar] and [same] as you have it. The input setting you are using overdrives the amp's front end in a bad way. I hope this helps.

You really, really don't need to use a high gain amp model as a distortion pedal... But, back to the clean tone clipping. Can you make up a quick single amp patch with just the Cougar, all settings as described above, and let me know what you hear? Thanks!

DSP overload. I don't have 500X. Why are you using two amps? There is no obvious tone advantage. What happens if you set up exactly as suggested above, in all details? What do you hear?

>>Well for starters, having the Master at 100% will cause the power stage of the model to distort. Can you set up a basic new patch as suggested above and let me know how it sounds. Okay, I'll walk that back :-) I'm a guitarist, but I've dug out a (4 string) bass with an active preamp and Bartolini Mk 1 pickups and with this, at least, the Cougar 800 amp isn't clipping with Master Vol cranked to 100% I've touched nothing - controls are as they load when you pick the amp model for the first time. Switching cabs from the default 410 Rhino to the 8x10 SV Beast doesn't cause any problems - again I've touched nothing, cab DEPs included. However, I'm using a 4 string bass.

Well for starters, having the Master at 100% will cause the power stage of the model to distort. Can you set up a basic new patch as suggested above and let me know how it sounds.