daedae

"Sounds digital" is a critique of modelers I've seen a lot, but it's something that has never really meant anything to me. It's probably a side effect of my history with equipment and playing, though -- there was an old 30W Yamaha solid state combo amp I played through growing up, but never with the volume higher than probably 1 or 2, then I had an overpriced 15W Crate practice amp, then a Behringer V-Amp2, and now the HD500 and Guitar Rig 5/Amplitube 3 VSTs. I also hear people say things about how a model might respond like a real amp in the sense of cleaning up when you roll off the volume or pick attack, but I'd been playing at least 15 years before I ever saw anybody adjust their pickups, volume knob, or tone knob while playing, so... maybe I just don't notice that sort of auditory nuance ;) It's been a while since I messed with my POD or tried to create any patches, because I stopped playing out much and so I mostly just record with Guitar Rig right now. But yeah, my recollection is that either my distorted rhythm patches would sound wimpy because I would turn the channel volume down and master up, or my clean patch would distort because I would have to bring up the gain.

To try to get this sort of back on topic (I've had an AxeFX II sitting in the shopping cart for like two weeks now, agonizing over whether to pull the trigger)... I find your comment interesting in that meambobbo's guide seemed to indicate it was doable, if not "easy," to get usable high-gain tones out of the POD HD series, but it was just about impossible to get good clean tones. And it seems like that has been my experience as well, in an attempt to get things level matched my clean channels would always end up breaking up. I haven't tried the model packs though, so maybe the JC120 model makes it easier. But I guess that falls under "YMMV" :)

There's a thread about this sort of thing going on on TGP right now... somebody called out the (critical, I would say) distinction that when you're trying out an amp in the real world you just have the amp and a cab in a room going straight to your ears. With a modeler you're now going through an emulated speaker and emulated microphone into some other set of speakers or your headphones and you're necessarily just not getting the same instant response. An interesting experiment for this would be to see whether running the POD into a DT amp, or otherwise running POD preamp models into a poweramp and cab, makes it easier to quickly dial something in and immediately sound "good" by going back to that sort of amp into cab in the room experience. (If anybody wants to buy me a DT, I'll take one for the team and do this experiment myself ;))

Well... If one were in the argumentative mood (which I'm not really, but the L6 forums are usually full of people who are ;)) you might put those two together and argue that L6 is punishing customers for not upgrading to the X series... </troll>

Oh, well, if you want to be *serious* about it...

... security bugs, for the FW for a non-network-connected device? Did somebody hear too many people talking about jailbreaking the POD? ;)

Hm...I must've misread (or misunderstood) DI's original post, because I thought the point was that the global EQ and some changes required for it would USE around 4% more DSP, not free up that much DSP.

Yeah, I just picked up a bundle with Amplitube 3 in it (yay, now I can rotate through Guitar Rig, Amplitube, and my HD500...) and the officially licensed models for amp heads seem to run as much as $30 a pop.

DI can correct me if I'm wrong, but a previous post said unless it explicitly said it was from POD Farm then the models are "at least HD." So it looks like those three bass amps should fall under the "at least HD" heading.

Yes. I'm sure standalone GR5 has somewhere to set what input to use, so you'd just choose the POD input the same way as you would to set up recording in a DAW. (Don't have it in front of me so I can't find exactly where it is.) Just don't put anything in your signal chain on the POD.

...aaaaand cue/resume the speculation that new firmware with new amps and/or effects will appear at some point.

I'm pretty sure this is the 2.0FW, I don't remember having gone through the effort of upgrading it since then. And yeah, there may be some room for improvement with post EQ or tweaking the amp settings, this was just with one of the included presets and no further tweaking. I saw nobody had responded to your post so I figured I could spare a minute or two to give you something :)

Don't know if it's a "good" demo ;) This is my 89F through the 5150 model in Guitar Rig 5: https://soundcloud.com/d-upton/pmtest/s-WZsAW

It would seem not everybody agrees that the tweaking is clever and/or gets the most out of your cabs ;) Since it's already convolution based and there is some max IR sample count that will work within the current processing confines, I wonder at the cost/benefit analysis of just letting users splat down custom IRs that fit those confines sans filtering, optimization, and the like -- nothing other than converting to the format the POD uses, and maybe even swapping the storage with a stock cab if the storage is limited as well. Would the effort buy enough goodwill to justify the cost of the developers and tests, regardless of the difference in sound quality, or is the concern that it would sound poor enough that users would say "If you weren't going to do it right, you shouldn't have done it at all?"

Contribute to, or write from scratch? ;) Actually you could just link to meambobbo's site for a lot of the basics and then just "contribute" how to use that knowledge to mold other tones...