Got my II on Friday. Played thru the first couple dozen factory presets, which are pretty basic amp demos. They sounded awesome. Wanted to use it Sunday evening at church. So on Saturday I proceeded to "copy" my go to worship patches, a Class A (with Top Boost tonestack) and a Plexi. Carefully entered all the settings exactly as they are on my Standard. Whoa - this was not working.
So I instead went to the factory presets for those two amps, tweaked a little for volume, chorus and delay and just like that I was in business. I hadn't looked earlier but now I discovered that the settings in these presets are very close to default, not extensively tweaked like my old ones. And they sound truer - richer, lush, more complex, more authentic. Some realistic terms for you Dutch!
Sunday I quickly changed the default CC's to match what was already set up in my Liquid Foot Jr and everything worked perfectly and sounded better than ever! That impression held and was was confirmed by comments made at rehearsal and during the service by my bandmates, only one of which knew I had a new black box.
Based on this short experience, I can see I'm going do be doing away with a few former practices - drives in front of low/medium gain amps to add hair (the hair is already there), blocking and shaping PEQ's to cut in the mix, a lot of bass, mid & treble dialing, to name a few.
The II is a whole new beast, the new algorithms sound superior, and old settings won't map to the new box. This is going to make dialing tones much more straightforward and rewarding.
So, yeah, 'smokes' is pretty much dead on!