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One week in on FRFR (Studio Monitors only)


PiFromBRC
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I bought two HS5's last weekend and mated them with my 15" sub in the HS.  I'm very satisfied with the results and I'm looking forward to showing some skeptical friends.  Well...I was.  I was doing fine tuning in my tones until today when I made it to my Lifeson Paul.  

 

Back to the drawing board.  The tone is for 5hit.  I'm not even in the same zip code. Lost the crisp highs, too much lows, and the blend on the modulations is completely lost.  The Piezo pathways are beyond bad.  Think "Ubiquitous kid at Guitar Center messing around with his first pedal on an amp he's never played turning every dial to eleven"-bad.  I've spent two years dialing six different Lifeson presets in to play through either my amps' Guitar In on one set list and amps' Aux In's on my pretend FRFR set list.  The FRFR ones are completely trashed.

 

I'ma gonna clean my kitchen now.  : (

 

 

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It shouldn't come as any surprise that there would be a significant difference in the construct of your signal chain if you're going from using a guitar amp to an FRFR.  The primary difference SHOULD be that the presets that were going through your amp wouldn't have any Helix cabinets or IRs in them because they're relying on the physical guitar amp cabinet.  Of course if you DID use a Helix cab/ir on the preset and corrected for it, well that correction isn't going to be relevant and likely detrimental to an FRFR setup.

 

The ideal and expected situation would be that your presets used with the amp and it's cabinet wouldn't have a Helix amp/ir, so the FRFR preset would simply add a cab/ir to the signal chain and all would be good.

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When I'm having a bad day I take a break... then come back and approach it differently. Not sure about you... but if I head down a path with the wrong attitude (eg: this thing sounds like crap) I will never get what I am after. Usually I get an "ah-ha" moment when I am not trying so hard.  

 

It takes a while to wrap your head around the concepts and techniques of going to FRFR. You are no longer using an "amp in the room", you are now adjusting your guitar from the producer / sound tech's perspective - it's completely different and takes some time.

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@DunedinDragon: I did have cabs and/or IR's on the pretend FRFR setlist as I was using the aux return on three different amps.  I knew there would be some adjustment.  I wasn't expecting the departure I found.  TBH, it actually did create a 'trash it' situation.  I hauled the amps up last night and plugged them in; all good.  Going in to FRFR, it is a completely different sound.  I knew the aux-returns were coloring.  I didn't think they were painting.  I was actually quite surprised as it negated the settings of some of the fx to the point where I actually trashed the fx blocks and started re-auditioning.

 

I took a break to clear my grumbling (my kitchen is flawless) and approached it from a raw perspective last night.  I started building in a more traditional chain and ended up with the beginnings of a decent late-70s era Lifeson base.  I'm going to spend some free parts of the next couple of days getting it toward Template Status so I can hopefully start the (long, back-to-basics, trial-and-dammit) rebuild process.

I'm a generalist on tones with the exceptions of Lifeson and Adam Jones.

Oh crap...my Adam builds...
 

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3 hours ago, codamedia said:

It takes a while to wrap your head around the concepts and techniques of going to FRFR. You are no longer using an "amp in the room", you are now adjusting your guitar from the producer / sound tech's perspective - it's completely different and takes some time.

 

Yeah.  Now I see why nobody likes their producer or sound tech.

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