daedae

Interesting.

 

I found it nigh on impossible to get good clean tones out of the AxeFX. Same problem with the Boss stuff. Always sounds digital to me, which is less of an issue for metal.

...

RE: your level matching comment: Are you saying you could get clean tones you liked, but not at a volume you liked?

"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.

I bought both the AxeFX and the HD500 because they're better at different things, for my purposes. To make a gross generalisation, I would say the AxeFX is better at metal, and the HD500 is better at rock/pop/blues/clean. YMMV. But, while Paul McCartney was a great melody writer, he also wrote some pretty good lyrics, and John Lennon wrote some pretty good melodies.

 

The best solution I would say is if you can, don't sell the old gear until you've tried the new gear, unless you're really, really sure you're never going to be happy with the old gear. Of course, one does not always have the finances to do it in that order.

 

And to all, I hope we find the tones we're looking for, wherever we can, with whatever gear we can.

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" :)

Forgive me if I'd like to see amp models sound a little closer to the way they do when you actually try out an amp. And most "good" amps can be dialed in in just a few seconds in the real world.

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 ;))

Do you really think Line 6 is constantly looking for ways to punish their customers, and that you've uncovered one?

Well...

 

Yes, we could've waited for all of them to be ready, but that'd be a lame ploy to blindly appease users of older SKUs for no real practical reason.

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>

They are surely adding security to protect the model packs from unauthorized use ...

 

 

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

 

The new firmware 2.6 will be available in mid April. It is not out yet. The firmware will be free, but if you want more aviable amps, that will cost money. The free firmware update will fix some security bugs, and add a global EQ setting.

 

... 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.

Pretty sure on Amplitube you pay for each amp. 

 

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.

I just want to say Thank You Dear Lord and Line 6!

This is awesome!

***From a previous post earlier*** I was wrong! And I don't mind admitting I am wrong when Line 6 does such an amazing release like this!

Thank you for hearing the people! Can't wait to hear the remastered JCM 800 and thanks for the addition of the Bass Pack.

Are these new BASS amp modellers or model from the XT pro line?

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.

POD HD isn't going away anytime soon—she's got plenty of life left in her.

...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

 

The HD's cabs are indeed based on convolution, but we didn't just slap an XXX-point IR in there. There's a lot of clever tweaking, filtering, and optimization to get the most out of our cabs (perhaps akin to what Cliff does with AxeFX II's Ultra Res IRs—within the confines of HD—but I'm not sure), and unfortunately, there's no easy way to apply the same process to third-party or user IRs. Hence, there's no way for third-party IRs to take up the same DSP resources as the stock cabs.

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?"

Nah, meambobbo is a pure metal player, the guide made to achieve a high gain tone, that is the most difficult tone to achieve.

 

Plus he jump to kemper (as far as I remember), and he was disappointed from the requests he made and never happened here...a

 

So we will not see him soon...

 

But I would like to contribute to a blues tone guide :D

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.

I suggest you go to Vguitarforums. That site has lots of information on virtual guitar rigs, and MIDI, and particularly Roland MIDI guitar interfaces. I'm sure you will find what you're looking for there.

 

http://www.vguitarforums.com/smf/index.php

Thanks, I'll check that out too...just figured I'd give it a shot here first :)

I also have an Axon AX50, which is the simplest expression of what you're looking for, but... I can't recommend it.

It used to track better than it does now, I don't know what's wrong with it. I tried different versions of the firmware 

since I started noticing, but I can't get it right again. That's one of the reasons why I ended up buying the GR.

As someone pointed out, the GR is not the best thing if you want to trigger external sounds, but it isn't so bad either.

I'm using GK3 pickups anyway, and your piezo equipped Godin tracks better than the GKs, so I wouldn't worry too

much about the tracking on either device, be it the Axon or the GR. Let us know when you get your hands on one.

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?

Actually you wouldn't which is what's so great about this.  The parallel tuning section tunes up the sympathetic string a whole octave.  You then set the mix to 100% which means you only hear the octave sympathetic string.  Then in the strings section you go up 10 frets to G.  The 10 frets combined with the octave (12 frets) makes the total you've tuned the string up to 22 frets.  Which is what is needed.  I have done this and it works!!!  No capo!!!!  Wahoooo!

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.