phil_m

Does the volume increase higher than when you have the volume pedal at maximum, or are you just saying the volume increases because you have to move the pedal to toe position to hit the toe switch? If it the second thing, there's not really much you can do about it without getting an additional expression pedal or using an standalone volume pedal.

Well, the one thing you could do in a tone where you have both wah and volume is to make it so the toe switch toggle both the wah and volume. You'd just have it set up so that when one is one the other is off. When you hit the toe switch to turn the wah effect on, the volume pedal will be off, and you will essentially be at full volume. So in that sense, the onboard pedal wouldn't be working too differently than if you weren't using a second pedal. You'd have to also make sure that both the sweep of the volume and wah effects are controlled by EXP1. Actually, now that I think about it more, I probably spoke too quickly in saying you absolutely can't do what you want to do above. Between using the toe switch to toggle different effects on and off, you can have EXP1 and EXP2 assigned to control different things depending on what effects are on at the time.

The toe switch still works if you have an external expression attached, but it doesn't switch between EXP1 and EXP2. You can still use it to turn the wah (or whatever effects you want) on and off. The way to think about it is that there are two expression controllers - EXP1 and EXP2. If you're just using the onboard pedal, you toggle between which one the pedal is controlling by pressing the toe switch. Once you connect a second pedal, the onboard pedal controls EXP1 and the external pedal controls EXP2. So to answer your question directly, no, you couldn't do what you have outlined here. EDIT: Actually, I am probably a bit wrong in saying you can't do what you want to here. See my comment below.

Does the Blues Jr hum or exhibit any signs of weirdness without the POD connected? If not, I'd say it's probably not the tubes. It sounds as if you have some sort of ground loop occurring if you're able to get the hum to go away with the hum eliminator. And if it works, I'd say go with it. Ground loops can happen even if you have everything hooked up correctly. If you plug everything into the same power strip, that's one way to help minimize the risk, but it doesn't completely eliminate it.

Well, if by controlling the POD, you just mean editing and arranging presets, Zap is correct - Gearbox allows you to do that over the USB connection. As far as having MIDI and using the computer, there are some people who like to set up automation tracks in their DAW to control the POD so that the DAW turns effects on and off or changes patches, etc. during the course of a song. If you don't know what the term "automation track" means, then that probably doesn't apply to you. Other than that, MIDI gives you the ability to control the POD with third party controllers.

Well, true... I was assuming he was meaning controlling it via MIDI PC and/or CC commands sent from a DAW.

You're correct on the fact that the POD does become your soundcard when connected with USB. As far MIDI, the X3 bean has no MIDI capabilities whatsoever. It doesn't have MIDI ports, and it doesn't do MIDI over USB. So on that end there's not really anything you can do.

In Reaper, if you go to the track you're recording, and you hover over the red "arm" button for the track you want to record with your mouse, if you right click a menu will come up. It will give you a bunch of different options, but the first one is "Monitor Input". It should be unchecked. Actually, all of the first four options concerning monitoring should be unchecked. So, if any of them are checked on the track you want to record, click them to turn them off.

I think Zap is probably correct. There's an option under the audio section of the properties window to turn off monitoring during recording. I'm not at my computer with Reaper on it at the moment, so I'm not sure where it's at exactly. But that sounds like the problem.

Could you be a little more descriptive of what "absolute lollipop" means? :)

Actually, you shouldn't have to worry about that in Reaper... It automatically mutes any track that's armed for recording. Do you (the original poster) have your monitors connected to the HD500?

As far as how they sound, I'd say if you search on Google under the different model names of the mics, you should be able to get some opinions. All the mics are pretty standard studio mics. If you want to add distance between the mic and the cab, this is what the E.R. (early reflections) parameter does. Setting it higher will moves the mic further from the cab, so you get more of the sound of the virtual room.

When you place effects after the amp block in the HD500, they come after what it essentially the preamp of the DT50. So it's not really not any different than how a serial effects loop in an amp works. It's generally not possible to put effects after a power section in an amp, well, because once the signal comes out of the power amp, it's much too hot to send through an effect unit. I imagine what you're hearing has to do with how the attenuator itself is interacting with the power amp and the speaker. The more you attenuate a signal from a power amp, the more high end you lose. Since delay and reverb depend very much on the high end of the signal to sound the way you want them to sound, it could just be that the attenuator is sucking a lot of your tone.

It sounds as if you may have a bad VDI cable or perhaps less likely one of the VDI jacks is damaged. I would bet on the cable. There are a lot of people using the VDI connection successfully, and you shouldn't be having the issues you described.

The high gain models in the Custom 1 bank are hard-coded there for now, so you can't copy them into any other locations or overwrite them with anything else yet. That should change in the future, but that's the way it is right now.

I believe that switch simply plugs into the expression pedal jack and toggles between the heel and toe positions. People have been doing this sort of thing since the DL4 came out.

It's funny to be referred to as a "volunteer". I guess, technically, that's the correct term. None of the people who have the Expert User title are paid, and some of us have been involved in beta testing (other people have too). But I liked and used Line 6 stuff well before any of that happened. It was actually my positive interaction with Line 6 customer service that convinced my to do what I do here. I wouldn't do it if I didn't think it was worth my time. I guess I am curious to how people think Line 6's customer service is deficient. For a company of their size, I think they do very well. They actually moved away from the forums being a customer service venue a while ago. They are user forums, and that means they're mostly a way for users to talk to each other. There are a lot of questions that get asked that aren't really customer service issues, so in that sense the forums are useful. If people have actual problems with gear, the way to receive attention is to use the support ticket system.

NAMM = Not available, maybe May... Seriously, it's not at all uncommon for companies to announce things at trade shows and run into things that slow the actual release of a product. It's kind of hard to be too upset about the delay of a free update. I suppose there are some people that could have been pushed over into buying a Variax based on the announcement, but even then, the announcement regarding the Variax was so vague it's not entirely clear what it will actually do. My suggestion always is that you buy a product based on the features and benefits it offers now, not for something it may or may not offer in the future.

I totally understand what you're wanting to do, but, unfortunately, there's not a way to do it. I think this is an instance where having something that split the difference between a preset-based rig and a traditional pedal setup would be nice. The M13 kind of does this in the way that is has the autosave feature. If you use that it will remember all changes you make to a scene automatically and bring them up that way if you go back to that scene. The HD500 doesn't have that. I actually don't know of any other multi-fx units that behave that way. One thing you could consider is controlling the DT-25 via MIDI. You could assign MIDI PC commands to footswitches on the HD500 and use those to change the amp model on the DT-25. This would be a way for you to keep your effects constant and still have access to different amp sounds all while being in the same preset on the HD500.

Thank you, dboomer, for that explanation. I got the 250W off of the spec sheets for the speakers (the L3M is here, for example). I wasn't actually aware of the UL rule for speaker load ratings, but it makes sense. I often here people say "a watt is a watt", and that's true, but it depends on the actual load condition and when that will actually be seen. The acoustic side of dealing with speakers is much more complicated than the electrical side, at least when we're talking about power ratings and all that. As far as the electrical load side, dboomer is correct too. Using a 15A power strip essentially acts like a bottleneck on the circuit if you're dealing with 20A breakers. If you need the extra 5A, there actually are 20A strips available. Personally, like I mentioned before, I appreciate having the extra circuit protection. The breaker at the board is really designed to protect the wire that's connected to the breaker, not necessarily the equipment downstream. Also, if you do accidentally trip the breaker in the strip, it's a heck a lot easier usually to reset that breaker rather try to find the panelboard in many venues. For load monitoring, what you would need is ammeter. Ideally, you'd want one that could record peak demand over a certain time period. It would be an interesting little project to hook one up during a show to see the types of draws you get. There are a few meters I've seen that plug into a receptacle, but I think most of those are designed to measure energy, kWh. That really won't help in trying determine the peak loading of the circuit.

That is quite a lot on one circuit. I imagine, though, that most of the time the speakers aren't drawing anything near their rated wattage. The 250W rating would be at the maximum output.

The actual rated electrical power consumption of the L3M and the L3S is 250W. So even with 4 connected to a single power strip, you'd be at 1000W. Assuming you have a 15A power strip, you'd still be well under the 1800W capacity. So you should be fine. Actually, using a power strip is usually a good thing to do. Assuming its fused, it gives you another level of circuit protection.

Well, technically, this is true. It seems though this poster is probably talking about hum from a ground loop simply because the noise only appears when two amps are connected. It doesn't seem like he's talking about hiss that happens when the noise floor is too high.

When you're dealing with audio signals, clipping is what happens when you try to send a signal that's too strong into a preamp or interface. Some interfaces will have a meter on that shows the level of the signal. Some will simply have a light that blinks. Clipping will generally sound really bad - fuzzy, distorted (in a bad way). If you have the unbalanced outputs set to line instead of amp, this signal could be hot enough to clip your interface's input depending on where you have the HD Pro's master volume set.

When you listen to the signal coming from the HD Pro through headphones or plugged directly into monitors how does it sound? Could it be possible that you're clipping the input of the audio interface you're going into? Also are you sure you have the HD Pro set to the correct output mode, which in this case would be Studio Direct?