I'm sure most of you veterans already know this. I have periodically experimented with the cutoff frequencies on overdriven tones...Mostly for getting the characteristic Allen Holdsworth violin tone. I'll typically set the high frequencies to cut off at on or just under 3k. However, the other day, I noticed on my strat I noticed that the clean and semi-clean tones were just super zingy and the bridge pickup was ice-picky. So, I set the high freq cutoff to 4k.
WHAT A DIFFERENCE!!!
In retrospect, I think the axefx architecture tends to add some low end and high end that is not present in the real amps and setting these cutoffs properly is essential to getting a more realistic sound.
Hi Jack
How much time have you spent running the Axe through a good ss power amp and a real guitar cab that you are familiar with?
I think that after you've done some of that you'll come to realise that the hi-lo issues you're talking about are not issues with the Amp Block but rather with the Cab Block.
In particular, the Fender, and Mesa sims sound pretty much identical through my EV cabs as the real amps sounded.
The Cab Block, as it is designed now, can not duplicate the sound of a real cab in the room.
But what it can do is to pretty much perfectly match the tone that a recording engineer (or FOH guy) would see at his console when mic'ing a cab with a particular mic (or mics) at a particular mic position(s).
As you know, close mic'ing always involves extremes of top and/or bottom end in the signal.
Sometimes you can find a mic position that doesn't require any further EQ at the console but that's a rarity IME.
Most cab IR producers do not EQ the IRs they sell but will offer several mic positions instead.
But some IR producers will do some EQ'ing.
The companies that offer "Mix" IRs, taken form several mics at once, usually do some rudimentary EQ'ing even of their single mic IRs.
But in my experience even these need some further EQ.
Personally, I'd like to see the EQ section in the Amp Block expanded to at least a 3-band full parametric.
But I doubt that Cliff will do this because it would increase the already large CPU hit that the Cab Block imparts now.
The 3-band EQ available in the Cab Block's Preamp section now doesn't seem to really get to the frequencies that I need for taming the IRs I need to tame.
Of course we can just add a post Cab Block a PEQ Block now and accomplish the same thing as what I'm advocating.
I think that most of us have had issues with the Cab Block over the years because for most of us the thing we really want to capture into our FRFR systems is the sound of a real cab in the room because that's what we're the most familiar with from playing real amps.
There are people, like Jay Mitchell, who claim that this CAN be done using far field IRs (possibly mixed with room and back-of-cab IRs), but I've never been able to get there.
So "settling" for a good mic'd cab tone is pretty much the state-of-that-art at the moment.
But I've often advocated for a different type of cab simulation in the Axe, one not based on IRs but rather on sophisticated and powerful multi band EQs designed to help the player achieve a frequency response curve out of an FRFR speaker that is very close to the frequency response of a guitar speaker.
I've tried several times over the years to do this with the EQs and Filters already provided in the firmware, but have never really gotten anything satisfactory.
But I have come close.
It's the Red Box/Palmer PDI approach vs the cab IR approach.
There are IRs of both the Palmer and the Red Box floating around but they never seem to be as satisfying as real cab IRs.
So I think that that tells me that even if I could do a near perfect EQ-based cab sim I'd probably opt for a real cab IR anyway.
lol
But then I don't play FRFR live.
I'm an an power amp + real cab guy.
I only use FRFR for recording at home or to send to FOH if I don't want to deal with a mic on stage.
But usually I'll just let them mic me.
Same in the studio.
So I've learned to just trust Cliff over the years.
He know a LOT more about ALL of these issues than anybody and he's on our side.
He knows what we really want.
He knows what we really need.
And he knows how to give it to us at the level of the current state-of-the-art.
Let your hunt for the perfect IR begin, if it hasn't already.