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Raw PV Panama (5150) sound demo and thoughts


alienux
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I'm very happy with the way the HD 5150 amp has turned out. It's my favorite amp model on my Peavey Vypyr II amp, and it's now probably going to be my favorite on my HD500X.

 

Having said that, it definitely needs some tweaks and adjustments to get a usable sound. To my ears, the default settings have way too much mosquito buzz and a little too much low end, but to be honest, the exact same is true with the 5150 model on my Vypyr amp, so I believe that those are just characteristics of the actual amp (but I've not played on a real 5150, so my experience is limited to modelers).

 

I purposely recorded this clip with the default settings of the amp model to give an idea of the sound without any adjustments. The only exceptions are that I increased the mids about 12%, I added plate reverb and I added tape echo. Also, I did not add drums or bass when recording to let the guitar be fully heard.

 

So, all of the items that to me need tweaked are still present in this clip, so you'll hear too much buzzyness. But again, this is purposely to give a demo of the raw sound of the amp without much tweaking. I plan on doing an A/B comparison with my Vypyr 5150 settings, which I have set the way I like, to get this more in line with that. Lowering the gain, lowering the presence, reducing the bass and treble a little, and a few other things should get this amp model sounding pretty good.

 

http://www.mediafire.com/listen/2cxbx2idr74x726/PVPanamaAmpModel.mp3

 

 

Edit: I also meant to say that for this clip,  I did not change the input settings to guitar/variax instead of guitar/same, so changing that may help, too.

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I think the raw sound is close but not spot on as well. I spent a little time trying to clean it up and tame the lower eq frequencys but moved on. I was just running into headphones, no real amps just to get an idea of whats what.

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It definitely needs work.  To my ears it's very cold and sounds nothing like a 5150 so far.  I'd say if you take the panama riffs out of the equation, it just sounds fizzy and cold.  You'd have to EQ out the nasty frequencies with an EQ block.

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To my ears it would be unusable live as is. I agree though with some massaging it might be pretty cool.

 

The fizziness...is tough to overlook.

 

Thanks for posting...nice to hear it as is...

 

Yeah, I definitely won't be using it live without the tweaks I mentioned above. But like I said, my Vypyr II had the same exact out of the box fizzy sound for the 5150 (actually 6505 and 6534 versions) and I was able to tweak it to get a really good live tone. I'm hoping to use that as a guide to get this to the same sound or better.

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The Fred is sold as a medium output pickup, but I'm sure your right about it being hotter than EVH's pickup at the time.

 

The default gain on this amp model is I think somewhere around 45% (I can't remember for sure and I'm not near my equipment right now). That seems lower than a lot of other amp models percentage-wise, but even at below 50% this model is much more gain heavy than many others. I've started tweaking from the defaults used in the clip and I currently have the gain down to about 22-25% and I'm thinking about bringing it down slightly more.

 

I also changed the input settings to guitar/variax and it helped.

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Well, I vaguely remember an interview with Hartley Peavey in a kind-of recent guitar world interview (it was the umpteenth anniversary of some Peavey product(s) )where he said something to the effect of "it had the most gain of anything at the time; Five 12ax7s - it would make a cannon out of a mosquito-fart". So it should be no surprise that it's one gainy SOB. :D

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Well, I vaguely remember an interview with Hartley Peavey in a kind-of recent guitar world interview (it was the umpteenth anniversary of some Peavey product(s) )where he said something to the effect of "it had the most gain of anything at the time; Five 12ax7s - it would make a cannon out of a mosquito-fart". So it should be no surprise that it's one gainy SOB. :D

Yeah, that sounds about right :P

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