How To Translate Good Headphone Sounds To The Stage?

[gitaryzt1985]

I have an HD500x and I'm having difficulty in matching the tones I practice with at home to something that also sounds good on stage through a church PA.  It always seems like once I get my patches set up perfectly through my headphones, it is either too bright or too dark once I plug into the church PA.

 

Are there any tricks to matching the tone you get through headphones and PA's?  Is there a way to set up patches universally where you can be pretty close to the true sound you'll get out of a PA?  What do you gigging guys do when you take your HD500 to a new gig site and the patches sound like crap through the house PA???

[BlueViolince]

Rule #1: always tweak at full volume. Rule #2: learn the headphones or frfr you are using. My headphones are akg 240s, and I know they are dark, so I adjust accordingly. I never use them when adjusting tone or gain stage. I have a set of ath m50s that are more accurate, but they are better through my recording interface. Headphones are great for practicing, not so good for tone shaping. Rule #3, and this may just be me, but: keep an eq block in your chain that you don't use to get your base tone. I have one eq block in most of my patches, and I also keep a modded GE7 in my violin case at all times.

[silverhead]

Many people maintain two setlists - one for using headphones and another for PA output. There's no secret - just a lot of experimentation until you understand how to tweak a preset built using your headphones to sound best/similar when using your church's PA. The required tweaking will be different based on your specific headphones and the specific PA. That's because each device (headphones and PA) have different characteristics and hence the resulting sounds they produce are different.

 

One thing you can do (in addition to the above advice) is try to minimize the tonal differences of the devices by selecting headphones that match the frequency characteristics of your church PA as closely as possible. That typically means a very good quality set of studio headphones, with a high ohm rating as recommended by Line 6. But, while this will minimize the amount of tweaking required, there will still be tweaking to do. You might as well keep your existing headphones (assuming they are reasonable quality) and learn what adjustments you need to make. Then build and maintain your two setlists.

[brian6string]

Does your church record the services. Mine does (direct from the board, not post-production or anything). I found that the best thing I could do was get a copy of the recordings and tweak my patches afterward. Mostly, EQing was what I needed to do. It took several tries but eventually I landed on something I really liked.

 

If you have lots of time where you can setup in the space and use the PA, you could do something like this in reverse. Meaning, connect to the PA, use the looper function to record something, leave it playing back thru the PA and go stand somewhere in the church, listen, tweak, repeat.