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...

This happens to me fairly regularly too, unfortunately frequently when I am pretty far along in a recording session. I am sure I have led to many crash dumps coming into msft/line6 :) But the 64 bit driver at least on Win8/8.1 just seems buggy.

Of course, even that wouldn't help those of us with Windows Phones/Win8 tablets... and most recent desktops and laptops have bluetooth radios as well. So there are plenty of devices that already exist that are being left out, and "there will be an Android app soon" is little consolation.

Yeah, just one of these threads happens every once in a while anyway. THere's also a thread on ideascale that covers the same territory. As for the SDK, all it takes is a few hobbyists who want to play around with it. I don't know anything about DSP programming or amp modeling, but I might try it if there were a way to throw something down on the POD. (Then again, I could always just write a VST amp, but I haven't tried to learn the DSP necessary for that either...I guess I've hit the point of I already code all day, I'd rather just play guitar at night :p)

I have a patch set up that controls the delay time and feedback to make those trippy sounds mentioned above. I also have a bass patch with the expression pedal set up for one of the EQs (I forget which one) to simulate a dubstep wobble (instead of springing for a Hot Hand). And I think I have one that I mostly use for ridiculous noises where the pedal controls some ring mod parameters.

Thanks, I'll check that out too...just figured I'd give it a shot here first :) Somebody else recommended to me the Axon AX 100, although it does look like the AX 50 is more appropriate (the 100 seems to have sounds in it like the GR55). But at any rate, I searched some yesterday and it looks like Axons are no longer produced either.

This is kind of getting away from the point of the thread but maybe somebody will have an answer. I have a Godin that has the 13-pin GK output already, but no synth hardware that takes that as an input and really I'm more interested in triggering MIDI anyway. It looks like Roland used to sell the GI-20 that converts GK to MIDI, but it's out of production. As far as I can tell, I would have to buy a GR-55 or something like that that has both synth and MIDI out, but I would rather a pass through--does anybody know of a similar device that is still made?

One of us still not understanding, although it could be me. Let's imagine I want to play this chord on a banjo: |-7- |-7- |-7- |-7- |-7- The high G starts at the 7th fret, so we bar the other 4 strings and strum all 5. If we use your awesome tuning scheme on the JTV, we do the same thing and, at least pitch-wise, it sounds right. Now, I'm feeling chromatic and want to play this: |-8- |-8- |-8- |-8- |-8- On a banjo, I just slide up and now I bar all 5 strings, and there you go. But if we use your tuning trick to tune the A string to the G open, this is how it looks on the JTV neck: |-8- |-8- |-8- |-8- |-1- |--- Right? (And my hands are simply not that big ;)) But if you use a partial capo at the 7th fret and tune the A string such that the capoed pitch is G, then everything works right. I'm still missing something here, then let me know--I would be happy to not have to track down one of those two string capos :)

Cool, I wasn't sure whether you could put a pitch shift on top of the octave string up. You would still need to do capo up just that string and tune it so that the capoed pitch is the G, though, unless you only plan on playing that G open :)

I saw a video recently about how the guitarist from Local H has a separate bass pickup under his A and E strings that go out a different jack, I think through an octaver and into a separate amp. Assuming you don't have a JTV and don't want to go through that much surgery to make it happen ;) maybe you could try splitting the signal at the front of the input chain and try to low pass that side to limit it to only the bass notes. It won't even be close to perfect, but you might see how well or poorly it works.

1. I haven't tried it, but my understanding is VDI cable (as opposed to the TRS) can pull power from a POD. 2. Something like 9 hours? 3. I think I saw somewhere that it comes with 10s. My guitar could use some setup -- a couple of strings are too low and buzz a bit -- but I have been having too much fun with it to give it up. Plus, I don't hear the buzz as much on the modeled tones, just when I'm playing with the mags. Otherwise, no, I don't think the setup is any different than any other guitar with a double-locking trem.