Judkins401

Thanks for the input. I do realize it's going to take time to get comfortable with it, but is it realistic to expect that I will be able to get record worthy tones out of it, or am I wishful thinking? Also I noticed there are model packs available. Will this help in the process, or only make it more difficult adding more to an already extensive bucket of things to tweak. Thanks again!

I've searched a lot of the forums, websites, tutorials, and the manual trying to get a decent sound out of my HD500x. After 3 days of tinkering, and about 100 preset downloads, I can't get any more than an incredibly synthetic, excessively muddy, or excessively gainy sound out of this thing. My goal is to use the HD500x in my home studio to produce quality recordings. I'm working on an EP and as of right now, drums, bass, and vocals are done and sound fantastic, but I've tried recording multiple guitars on multiple settings, and no matter what it just sounds awful. I've been using Amplitube for a while and was tired of the crummy synthetic tone, expecting this to be better a splurged, and it actually sounds worse than Amplitube in most cases, or even a crummy 50$ solid state amp for that matter. To give you an idea of the tone I'm after, The style of music/sound I'm after is similar to Alkaline Trio, Blink 182, Hot Water Music, Matt Skiba And The Sekrets (If you take the time to check them out on youtube, I greatly appreciate your time!) I feel like this should be relatively easy as it's mostly just a crunchy distortion, nothing excessively gainy, no crazy effects, however all I can do is get a watered down weak, crappy sound out of the pod. I have taken the "best" raw recordings I could get, and tried EQ and compression and doctoring them up in my DAW but no matter what, it sounds like I'm recording out of a poor quality amp simulator. I've seen recordings from others on youtube using this device and it sounded great. Can anyone key me in to getting the most realistic sound possible? Again my goal is to use it to record. I don't want "demo" sounding recordings and that's all I can seem to get out of this thing! Currently using HD500x through mono output into Behringer interface, 44.1k, 24bit. Playback is through Yamaha studio monitors. I'm running through Reaper on a PC. I use this same setup occasionally to record a micd amp and it sounds fine, so I do know everything else in the system is working and configured correctly. Thanks in advance!