sonnyducks

I'm in the same boat as you....I have a POD HD500 that I've used for the last couple of years for a church gig and it has it's place. We recently went away from silent stage and we can use amps. I started hauling my Boogie Lone Star Special and pedal board (which is the same board you have....different pedals except for the Ditto which I have in the exact same spot as you). After a couple of Sunday's of hauling the amp I do miss the POD but only for ease of transport. I'll probably keep it for for use as USB interface for my Mac and probably use it on week's where there is bad weather. It's an excellent backup system.

Sorry to write a book and not address your original request, if you want a video I find Glenn DeLaune to have some of the best videos on the POD Try this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6I6WCufEtk

I'd agree with you that this thing is a bit complicated and I find you have to do too many "tricks" to get a good tone. Had I not needed something like this for my weekly church gig, I'd probably never have it. That being said like anything, you will have to put time into it to get something out of it. I got the POD b/c there were lots of tones on-line and my thinking would be I would just download a bunch and just use those. Well that is an option but it just didn't work for me. You have to wade thru too much crap in Customtone to find good stuff. It came down to selling it and finding an alternative or learning this thing. I chose to learn and guess what it didn't take too long once I started being serious about wanting to learn it. However this thing is massive and I decided to start real simple when learning it (see below). Some say use the HD Edit software to learn on, and that is valid. Since I'm only ever playing this thing on stage I did not go that route and instead just sat down one day in the living room while watching a baseball game and just farted around building patches w/o headphones or a guitar. That went a long way to learning the interface and now I can do anything quickly on the unit (except dialing in delay or controller assigns...those are way faster on the computer). I would just give myself scenarios where I would approximate a famous guitar players rig. That is a great exercise for learning the interface and since I wasn't on the floor or bent over with my guitar in my hand it was an enjoyable experance. My best tip: Find your go-to amp (mine are the Bassman BRT PRE). Using a blank patch go thru all the amps by themselves. DO NOT IGNORE PRE-AMP ONLY VERSIONS. They are totally different and IMO better than the full models. To my ears they are a lot less processed sounding. Once you have a go-to amp you'll have a baseline to build new patches from. You can also use CustomTone at that point to find out what others are doing with your favorite amp and that will give you some ideas. I quite enjoy the unit now that I have a handful of amps that I know how to dial in. My second best tip: Use the looper to build your patches. Record a phrase, put the looper in the front of your signal chain and then you can just go to town editing with both hands on the POD or computer. This makes building a tone much faster and you can get to writing/playing quicker.

You remember the amp model used in the patch...that would at least give me a starting point. Really wish we would get a Matchless amp model.

Anyone have a patch for Black Crows? Looking for a tone similar to the crunch on the "Shake Your Money Maker" album.

Thanks for the replies guys. @silverhead. Yeah I know doing it on HD Edit isn't a problem. This was a request to make editing on the unit itself a little easier. @phil_m: Thanks for that info.

I'd like to submit an idea for an enhancement where when editing effects on the POD HD500 itself (and the Bean and PRO too) you can see and edit multiple effect parameters on one screen. Perhaps like pages where page 1 is something like they have now where you can select the effect type and a page two where 3 of the 4 knobs allow you to edit effect parameters and the fourth knob is a page back/forth knob. I've always wished instead of 4 knobs that the HD500 has they would have done the hardware like the M9/M13 w/ 6 little knobs and kept a similar display for editing effects (with up to 5 parameters per screen). I'm sure Line6 had a reason for the current design but it is what it is.