Effects after cab block?

retnuH

Member
I just got my XL+ yesterday and although I am an experienced player. gearhead and tweaker, I have to get my new Axe rig up and running faster than I thought I would due to the band moving the schedule around so I am not going to have as much time initially to mess around with it all until I got it right that I thought I would and I apologize if this is something simple that I have overlooked or missed in my searches. I will have more time after the upcoming practice to flesh more out but have to get my basic eight presets up and running pretty quickly.
I dialed in the basics of two of my main gain patches this afternoon fairly easily through headphones with Axe-Edit but when I was looking at something in another patch I noticed that some of the factory presets have modulation, reverb, delay and other effects after the cabs. This is counter-intuitive to me and although I will shut the cabs off when I hook up to my live rig tomorrow, need the cabs for headphones and some of what I'm going to try to do in the future. It was mentioned in one thread that the effects wouldn't be true stereo in a preset with them between amp and cab unless a stereo cab was selected but is that it? I want to understand the reasoning so I can have the base of my new rig correct as much as possible to save time right now.
Can someone tell me what the difference is with them after the cabs vs. between them and tell me which way is best? Or point me to the resource where I cna read up on it? I fully understand effect placement in the signal chain of a regular rig but need to figure this out on the Axe before I get too much farther into my dialing in so my base presets and templates will be good from the start and I can base my others off of them.
Thanks!
Hunter
 
putting the time based effects after the cab is like having them in between the mic on the cab and the sound board(like most do in the studio) you can put any effect any were you want to No rules just if you like it, it is good. as far as building presets for practice with cab IR's(with head phones) when you will be turning them off for practice I hope this works for you but for me I prefer to adjust presets at volume, with the band.
 
Since a cabinet is linear (or mostly linear) the order is unimportant as linear systems are commutative (a+b = b+a). However if the cab block is mono your effects will collapse to mono if placed before.
 
I've been looking at options to go back to regular cabs from the FRFR world, which pretty much dictates that my cab be the last thing in my signal chain (without getting too crazy). I don't think I could even consider that an option if what CLIFF (a.k.a. "The Singularity") just said wasn't true.
 
Since a cabinet is linear (or mostly linear) the order is unimportant as linear systems are commutative (a+b = b+a). However if the cab block is mono your effects will collapse to mono if placed before.

I still don't get this. Does that mean they're applied to the signal at the same time? If not, surely it makes a difference whether you flange a signal before or after the Cab EQ is applied?
 
Think of the Axe fx as an entire recording chain - the question for you is 'where do you put your EFX when recoding your guitar signal?'
So, some EFX will go before the amp & cab (drive, wah) & some will go after (reverb, delay)
 
Wolfenstein98K - I would expect a truly similar (if not exact) result from the scenario you mentioned with a flanger/cab eq or cab eq/flanger (either order, as Cliff said). Give it a try and see if you don't agree, based on what you hear.
 
I still don't get this. Does that mean they're applied to the signal at the same time? If not, surely it makes a difference whether you flange a signal before or after the Cab EQ is applied?

The correct terminology is Linear Time Invariant (LTI). The order of systems that are LTI doesn't matter as they are, by definition, commutative. A flanger is not LTI. It is linear but not time invariant (obviously). That said a flanger is likely Wide Sense Stationary (WSS) so I doubt it would sound much different after a cab block vs. before (assuming the cab block is stereo and both channels are identical and each channel is fully panned).
 
Thanks all. Since I am trying to get it going through my mesa cabs first then I'll put them in the usual place in the chain before the cab and see how that works with the cabs off and go from there. They sound good through my rig so far that way so I see no reason to change them unless I figure something else out later.
I'll mess around with them in my headphone patches later to see what's up. My headphone patches are just to get the patch within range and then final tweaking is done through my rig. I turned some cabs off in my headphones before I fired it up through my rig and thought that there was no way it would sound good through my cabs but I was surprised that it sounds good out loud too. There is just a lot of dialing in to do now to get it right.
 
Keep in mind, here, though, that we're talking out effects of cabs before and after effects, and how that changes things. These "rules" don't apply to simply being able to put effects anywhere in the chain, and "it's ok".

For instance, if you put the delay early in the chain, and the drive at the end, all the delays will over-driven. Just an extreme example, to remind you that while placing certain effects before or after a cab may have little effect, placement of effects, overall, in a chain, can still be important to the final tone.
 
Keep in mind, here, though, that we're talking out effects of cabs before and after effects, and how that changes things. These "rules" don't apply to simply being able to put effects anywhere in the chain, and "it's ok".

For instance, if you put the delay early in the chain, and the drive at the end, all the delays will over-driven. Just an extreme example, to remind you that while placing certain effects before or after a cab may have little effect, placement of effects, overall, in a chain, can still be important to the final tone.

Yep thanks, I'm experienced in effects routing in a regular rig and was just wondering about them in relation to the cabs in the Axe.
 
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