Question on AXE behavior with different Guitars

N

Nagi Mysore

Inspired
Hello wonderful Axe Fans...
I had another question...I think I understand this but wanted to be sure...I am a noobie..

I have a EJ Strat and a Gibson Les Paul Traditional Pro with Burstbucker and something else pickups. When I play the EJ Strat, the volume is significantly lower than the Gibson...when speaker and AXE is set to same settings nothing changed except Guitar swapped. I believe this is due to the type of guitar and type of pickup...for e,g the Gibson even starts clipping and I wind up adjusting the output level to 3 O CLock...while thats a far cry for th EJ...I think this is because the pickups are "hotter" on the Gibson than on the EJ...Both of course have wonderfully different sounds and not comparable...completely different applications...

AM I correct in my understanding of generally how Guitars provide the signal...some hotter than others...which therefore impacts the volume??

Thanks

NM
 
Yep, you're absolutely right. Some guitars put out a hotter signal than others. There are many ways to compensate for this with the Axe-Fx.
 
One way to resolve this is to make two of the same patches - one for each type of guitar.

Humbuckers will be hotter than (most) Single Coils so adjust the input/output/drive/master levels
accordingly. :D
 
boltrecords said:
I make each preset for a specific guitar
Click to expand...
...and that's actually one of the main reasons the Axe is my rack's brain. using different guitars with the same amp is not always ideal, with the Axe you can just tweak the same amp for different guitars. doesn't get much better than this.
 
Yep. I actually have my axe set up with 3 banks of 5 presets for each guitar. So the first 3 banks are les Paul, second 3 banks are suhr, next 3 are strat and so on.
Each bank has clean, crunch, rhythm, lead one, lead two face melter

Although I am finding since about firmware 6 that the presets sound a lot better when switching guitars on the same preset. Not as big of a difference as I noticed in the past. Maybe it's just my ears though
 
boltrecords is right - the characteristic tones of each guitar are too diverse for a single patch set. I tried mightily myself. Just taming/matching the input levels does not do the trick. But it's easy to mod existing patches and save them for each guitar, which is what I should have done in the first place.
 
It's an interesting, young people who are use to solid state setups don't understand the nuances vintage setups entailed.
 
luke said:
It's an interesting, young people who are use to solid state setups don't understand the nuances vintage setups entailed.
Click to expand...

Well, I guess that you also were a newbie once upon a time? Obvious things aren´t that obvious when you start out in learning about something, remember?
Maybe you´d like to share some of your understandings, or perhaps just recommend some webpages/books where people can read and learn more of this kind of things?
 
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30 years ago we had vinyl records and friends we jammed with, we learned the long hard way.

There is so much information on the Internet and YouTube its mind boggling.
 
30 years ago we had vinyl records and friends we jammed with, we learned the long hard way.

There is so much information on the Internet and YouTube its mind boggling.
 
Another way to set up guitars: When you have a clean booster or a stomp eq lying around you can take it to boost the signal of the weak guitar (or lower the signal of the hotter guitar) before the signal enters the Axe-Fx. Why? I find it pretty tedious to have a lot of banks. Whenever you change something, you need to think about the other banks, if there's something to maintain too and often do it. With a booster/stomp eq you can play different loud guitars with the same presets. Downsides? Oh yes, one thing more to put in the rack and supply power and it needs to be good gear to avoid colouring the pure guitarsound.
 
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