NebWeb

Thanks. So it's what I would call a firmware patch. I'm up to 3.01. Just for information, they updated the manual to include the new stuff. https://l6c-acdn2.line6.net/data/6/0a060b316ac34f0593d2ca219/application/pdf/PODxt Live Manual - Version 3 ( Rev C ).pdf Are you a new owner? Enjoying your XT Live? I liked it when I first took up guitar again a few months ago after a 35 year break (and it was only 90€ too). But I find I need to spend too much time trying to search for useable tones. It's also a bit limiting, as most of the stomps, and all the synth stuff is not musically usable. Now I'm wondering about shelling out for a FireHawk!

I've got annoying dust and particles under the plastic of the display. Does anyone know how difficult or risky it is to open up the XT-Live and clean the plastic window and/or the LCD display? Thanks.

Some stomp effects do not have a gain level, and increase the volume way too much when engaged. Alternatively, on some effects, even when the gain is at zero, the volume still noticeably increases when they are engaged. For example (from memory), the AutoWah, CleanSweep and Bronze Master are too loud to simply enable with the stomp switch, without either turning my guitar volume down, or using another patch slot to reduce the volume of the amp. Other effects, like Killer Z, have their default so high that when scrolling through the effects list, I have to be really careful that my guitar is totally muted, otherwise I get blasted. I don't understand why the techs didn't have these problems in the lab, before these units went into production? Does anyone else have this kind of volume problem, or is it just me? Also, some synth effects such as 'Pod Purple X', 'Synth Lead', Dingo-Tron (from memory) are musically unusable because they just make off-pitch rumbles and squeaks. Or is there something wrong with my unit?

Sorry, may I ask what update are you referring to, and what free amps?

Did you have any success yet? Note that if you do the factory reset as outlined above, you'll lose any purchased packs which previous owners put onto it.

Some of the POD's have midi in/out, which can control most of the parameters and actions. There are a lot of weird and wonderful midi controllers out there, some made especially for people with disabilities. I don't know which country you're in, but in places like USA or UK you are almost guaranteed to have a music therapist nearby, who would be glad to help you solve your problem. They should know all about midi controllers and any other alternatives. Here's a reference document. The big hurdle is going to be mapping your chosen controller to the POD (or vice versa) successfully: https://line6.com/data/l/0a06000f1344c45ecbcd6e0293/application/pdf/MIDI Continuous Controller Reference One approach you might want to think about, at least to start off, is playing along to a backing track or metronome from your computer DAW software, and then use midi signals from the DAW software to change patches automatically at certain places throughout the song without you having to do anything.This means you wouldn't need to find a suitable midi controller to switch on the fly right away, and could learn about how the midi functions work on the PODs before experimenting with controllers.

You can edit the tuner to set the 'A' note between 425 - 455 Hz (usually it's set to A440). But that's all. I'm not sure that's even a half step. A half step up would be 466 Hz, I think. I don't quite understand why they bothered implementing this setting. Maybe if you wanted tune along to an out-of-tune piano, perhaps?

The manual for the XT Live is here: https://l6c-acdn2.line6.net/data/6/0a060b316ac34f0593d2ca219/application/pdf/PODxt Live Manual - Version 3 ( Rev C ).pdf Section 6·20 to 6·22 (page 110-112) describes the chorus effects. The analog chorus pedal modelled is a 1977 Boss CE-1. They also have a digital sine chorus. I wouldn't use the XT Live just for one effect! Personally I like the XT Live, but mostly for the layout of the footswitches and the ability to toggle individual effects within each patch. With regard to the actual effects, it takes a lot of time/effort to work within the unit's limitations, and find the best tones that it can produce. It definitely focuses on 60's and 70's tones. It doesn't really do 1990's onwards or modern metal very well in my opinion.

Dave's right. I've tried using bluetooth transmitters to send the signal from various equipment to my bluetooth headphones, but there is always a delay. Usually about 500-800ms. If you get an aptX transmitter and aptX capable headphones, you could get that latency down to about 50-80ms in practice (they claim 20-30ms on the box, but don't believe it). Your playing will feel spongy, and the signal compression will affect the quality too. As I understand it, latency is a fundamental weakness in the bluetooth protocol, and we won't be able to have lower latency headphones until another protocol is created and adopted.

> POD XT volume diferences between patches When you factory-reset the unit, the default patches will still have volume differences. Also, many of the default patches have very strange settings and are not musically usable until they are edited. Further, the stomp, modulation, delay and wah effects themselves all have weird default settings (which require editing every single time you build a patch). I don't know why the unit is set-up that way. The defaults could have been much better. Note that when you reset it, you will lose any amp/effects packs that have been bought and added by previous owners. Also I've read that if something goes wrong during the reset process, you could 'brick' the unit. If you do need access to the preset patches, you can get them by connecting the unit to a computer via the Monkey software. This also allows you to download patches which users have uploaded to the CustomTone website. So, taking everything into consideration, personally I wouldn't do a reset unless it is really necessary.

You seem to have a better tone than I can get. However, if you listen to the bend at 25s in Eyes Of A Panther, that is the kind of nuance I'm talking about. I can't help feeling that this bend, like my own, sounds somehow underwhelming. It loses power and 'texture'. It's too 'stable' at its peak. It's missing some of the emotion and strength that was put into it. That's one thing I'm finding really hard to achieve with this unit - that moment when you're tearing it up to a backing track, and that 'rock god' moment never comes. A fizzle rather than ignition. My growing opinion is that it provides a safe, stable sound for music like pop, blues and jazz, but if you want to rip it up a bit with some metal, or even get a bit dirty and punky, it lacks the punch and bite to do so; and when you push it too hard it just becomes a digital mess. However, this could also just be lack of experience with it, or some kind of psychoacoustic bias. As I said, I'm going to keep trying for a bit.

On the unit, above the output, right at the top, doesn't it have the following written... Balanced: Tip = + / Ring = - I think from that you could assume it is balanced TRS.

Yes, that's correct. Ideally you want a speaker which is as clean, neutral and flat as possible, so it doesn't colour the effects coming from the XT Live. But when using presets and downloaded patches, having a neutral sound yourself would only help if the person who created the patch/default preset also used an un-coloured amp or studio monitors. If your combo amp has an auxiliary input for inputting an mp3 and jamming along to, then you can try plugging the XT Live into that. This input should bypass the amp's own gain/EQ circuitry, and just apply fairly uncoloured amplification. You might have an effect loop in/out on your amp, and using that input would achieve the same thing. If you can't do that, then another way of adjusting your amp's tone might be to play some music through it (without equalizer applied in your mp3 player), and adjust the amp's bass/mid/treble so that the music sounds as unmuddied and crisp as possible. However, I know all this stuff and I'm still struggling to get a really good tone. Horrible tones - easy. Passable tones - with a lot of work. Killer tone - yet to hear it. This guy has a tone I'd like to achieve on the XT, but I'll be damned if I can get anywhere near that. Hear those pinched harmonics in his solo? Nope. Not on my gear. Yet if I put the guitar straight into the Roland Cube and choose one of the distortion models, I can get quite close to that sound easily. Having said that, I have only been able to spend a few hours on the XT so far, and mostly at very low volume. So I still have a lot of experimenting to do before I give up on it. But out of the box, the Zoom blows it out of the water. If the Zoom sound modules were in the XT Live casing, I'd be a happy man.

Regarding the XT Live, I'm in much the same boat. I'm using a 750€ Yamaha guitar and a 350€ Roland Cube (RRP fifteen years ago - I bought them cheap second hand). I bought a Zoom G1Xon (80€), and have no trouble getting good tones from it, even on very different amps. All the presets are a very good starting point, and I only need to tweak them a bit to get them to sound what they are supposed to sound like. The problem with pedals like that though, with only an up and down footswitch, is that they need to be 100% pre-programmed for your set. So I got a second hand XT Live because it had more flexible footswitches. However, getting a decent tone out of it is much, much harder. In my case the default presets were pretty much erased by a previous owner, and I can't reset the unit because then I'll lose the modelling packs they added. But using the Monkey software I have tried the default presets out one by one and didn't find anything close to what I was looking for. Further, nothing I've downloaded from the 'custom tone' site sounds anything like it is supposed to in the description either. For example, the Randy Rhoads preset I downloaded for the Zoom is beautiful without any tweaking. The Rhoads preset I downloaded for the XT Live sounds appalling; nothing like him at all, no matter how much I tweak it. Another thing is that I can make the guitar 'sing' and 'scream' very easily with the Zoom, whereas I can only describe the XT Live as 'stable' and 'flat'. For example, I can do pinched harmonics on it, but I'm left with the feeling that something was missing. With the Zoom I make a F*** yeah' face, and on the XT I tend to look over at my amp and make a 'WTF was that?' face. I think the XT is much more sensitive to equipment, and much less versatile than the Zoom, and I find presets a waste of time. I'm sure the presets sounded good on someone else's guitar and amp, but they don't translate well. Especially the way the cabs interact with the Stomp effects. I can get a half-decent tone using an amp/cab model, but then the Stomp effects just destroy it. I also find some of the default settings for the effects completely baffling. As you say, everytime you turn the tweak button, you don't know whether you're going to get your head blasted off. And some of the default settings just don't make any sense at all - as if they were set by a Line6 tech who didn't actually play guitar. It is really, really annoying that we can't save over the default settings of the effects. It should just remember the last user setting, and I think this is the biggest flaw of the unit. I've had the XT Live for several weeks, but I've only had a few hours to mess around on it during that time. The main problem I have at the moment is that I can't play loud in my apartment. So when I set-up tones at low volume that sound OK, when I take them to rehearsal, they sound completely different (and usually really horrible). I'm going to try to find a way of spending a few hours alone in our rehearsal space, creating tones from scratch at high volume, before I give up. I only paid 100€ for my unit, so it's not a disaster if I end up getting rid of it. But I still have hope that I can find one tone that I like which will sound good throughout the whole clean, crunch, distorted, chorus/phaser, and wah range of effects. I mean, professional musicians used this unit for gigging back in the day, so it must be possible to get a decent tone out of it. I should have more time over Xmas to play with it, and will post back if I have a breakthrough or some kind of epiphany. I don't think many of these older modelling units do Metal very well though, so I may have more luck than you. This guy seems to know what he's doing, so I guess this is as good as the Metal tones get. Sounds OK, but nothing special.

Do you use a cabinet with the Citrus? I guess I will just keep experimenting, and will get a better idea of what combinations of amp/cab/stomp sound good.

Absolutely. People who buy these units secondhand can't factory reset them because they'll lose the packs that the original owner put on them, and the packs are too expensive to replace relative to the resale price these units are now at. If the prices were halved, I would factory rest my unit and buy at least a couple of packs.

Thanks for your reply. I guess what I'm finding out is that many cab/stomp combinations don't work well. I don't think i'm doing anything disastrously wrong. I'm using a Yamaha RGX721DG (750€ in 1999) and a 30w Roland cube (350€ in 2004). 1) Set up my clean, neutral sound with everything on the XT bypassed (tone is good enough to use for finger picking in its own right). 2) Set up an amp model. In this case: Nº1 Tube Preamp with a blackface cab. A great strumming clean with a little more grit and response than bypassed. 3) Add a little delay and reverb to thicken the sound on both the Roland and XT. Add a little compression to even out my fingerpicking/strumming. 4) Add a little EQ to roll off some of the bass below 200Hz, and add a smudge at 1.5k, just to even out the tone across the range. Switching between the Roland clean and the XT clean is really nice. Loving it at this point. Then I turn my attention to the stomp effect, wanting to set-up a crunchy overdrive that I can use to lift choruses, or a distortion that I can use for lead. But when I do this, the tone is completely ruined and it sounds terrible, like a tiny practice amp. I didn't expect this, because I've plugged pedals like Boss DS-1 into many different combo amps, and they always sound decent. It is better when I take out the cabinet model and use just the amp model. Better still when I bypass the amp model too, and just use the Roland. I notice that a lot, if not most, downloaded patches use the amp/cabinet setting to get their crunch/distortion, instead of using a stomp effect. I think some of these digital effects are combining in a way that I'm not used to. You don't seem to have this problem though? You can add the fuzz/distortion effects to any amp/cab model and it keeps most of the tone? Do you have any particular method of setting up a patch, and choosing amps/cabs that go well with the stomp effects?

When I have a nice tone with the amp modelling bypassed (just going through my Roland Cube amp), most of the stomp effects detract from that tone quite a bit. When I have a nice tone using the amp modelling, the tone change is even more apparent, especially when also using the cabinets/mics. Many of the stomp effects suck all the tone out, and make my 30w/10" amp sound like a 5w amp at the bottom of a swimming pool. :) So say I'm cooking with a great clean/crunchy sound, and I want to enable the stomp to get a little more energy and sustain for the chorus or solo. however, the stomp effects sound tonally different in comparison to my clean/crunch sound, and not in a good way! Therefore, instead of just enabling/disabling the stomp on that patch, I feel like I have to create an entirely new patch that has different modelling and settings, just to allow for the stomp effect. I don't mind doing that, but it seems a bit convoluted. One of the reasons I bought this pedalboard was because I loved the idea of using the amp/stomp/mod/delay switches to alter the current patch slightly during a song, rather than switching to an entirely different patch. Does anyone else have this problem?

Just a small thing... In edit mode, the fourth screen is a compressor & gate. I can enable/disable the gate by pressing the right two buttons simultaneously. However, when the left two buttons are depressed, this does not work for the compressor, and it remains in its current disabled/enabled state. The only way to A/B it seems to be to leave Edit mode. Can someone confirm that the two-button press does not work for the compressor while on the edit screen? Or are my buttons broken? Thanks.

So basically, once you've saved over an amp preset, it's gone. I can't factory reset the unit, because I'll lose the metal shop add-on that a previous owner put on it. Thanks for the confirmation. > The dot tells you where the knob was set the last time it was saved [in a patch] OK, so an amp loads into a patch with either a factory setting or a saved custom setting. The dots show the setting of the amp when it was last saved in another patch. Thanks.

When I choose a patch, then double click the 'amp' foot switch, and start turning the selector knob, different amps load. 1) The amps load with their virtual pots in certain positions (some of them in very weird positions). Can anyone clarify that this is either the factory default setting or a user-saved custom setting? 2) The virtual pots have dots around the outside. Can anyone confirm that these dots are the last settings that I used for this amp model when saving it in another patch? The manual is not clear on this point. Further, if the previous owner has saved a custom amp setting over the factory default, is there a way to tell which amps have been altered by the user? Is there a way of getting an amp setting back to the factory default? Thanks.

Thanks for your replies. Yep - the one pictured in my link is very likely to be a AC/DC adaptor. Following your advice, I'm going to go try to go through the Line6 distributors, to see if they can locate an official replacement. http://l6locator.yamaha-europe.com/?country=ES#tab=tab-1

Maybe I'm just too old. We used to set our reverbs on the amps, or on a Boss DD3, to suit the room we were in, and just leave it alone. The idea of changing reverb for each song is very strange to me. If we wanted a bigger sound, we'd use a distortion and delay. Simpler times. :)

> but it is Roland COSM Damn it! I had a 50/50 and blew it. > 1986 Yamaha SBG1300TS I have a 1999 Yamaha RGX 721 at the moment. Very gaudy, retro late 80's looking thing. Beggars can't be choosers though. Plays well enough, and I don't need to change the pickups.

The previous owner of my XT Live replaced the original pack with a monsterous industrial multi-voltage adaptor, which is huge and heavy. I was thinking about getting this one 9V Charger Replacement Pedal Line 6 POD XT Live. Does that look like an AC/AC adaptor to you? It promises to be a bit too small and thin (110g 8x5x3cm) in my opinion. That's what I'd expect from a DC adaptor, and it doesn't seem to have the the 'boxy' shape of an AC adaptor. I'm worried that I'll either not get the AC charger pictured and end up with another huge one, or that I will get the charger pictured, but it won't be AC/AC. I'm trying to contact the seller, but it seems you can only do that through the stupid 'ask the community' feature, and very few sellers seem to reply to that. Opinions, please.