KornyDjentlemen
Member
Last night was my first practice with a brand-new AXE-FX III. I recently sold my Kemper in favor of the AXE-FX III because it can run multiple guitars at once, allowing me to route our second guitarist into my rig and…hopefully…get a nice tight and crisp sound by offering me a ton of control over our tone.
We play high-gain stuff, 7-string and 8-string guitars, and very loud - so it's naturally a very challenging environment. My hope that we could find a better, more cohesive sound with digital modeling than we could otherwise with real amps now that we are both direct. Better noise gates, EQ, multi-band compression, etc.
It sounded okay - we managed, but far from what I'd like to hear.
To keep it short and to the point:
Ideas? I’ve attached a diagram of how the practice space looked last night. How might you have done things differently if this is what you had to work with?
We play high-gain stuff, 7-string and 8-string guitars, and very loud - so it's naturally a very challenging environment. My hope that we could find a better, more cohesive sound with digital modeling than we could otherwise with real amps now that we are both direct. Better noise gates, EQ, multi-band compression, etc.
It sounded okay - we managed, but far from what I'd like to hear.
To keep it short and to the point:
- Sound was okay at low volumes, but once the drums kicked in (and our drummer is LOUD) things got mushy. A lot more sound was in the room and it just got hard to discern what was what. Keep in mind we don’t even have a bass player right now. I know this is pretty common issue people run into - where's the best place to start tweaking though? In what order would you do things?
- Rig rundown: AXE FX III -> Matrix GT800FX in stereo mode (400W each channel) going to two 16-ohm 4x12 cabs. I cut <150hz on the CAB blocks to try get rid of the mud in the PAs. I attached a diagram to help clarify.
- I ran the CAB sims out to FOH (output 1 L/R), while just the AMPs in SSPA + Cab mode (output 3 L/R) out to the Matrix GT800FX and real 4x12 cabs. To clarify, I am not running two guitars through one amp block in stereo. Instead I used a mixer block to combine two separate signal chains, before sending to an output panned hard left/right.
- If we play with IEMs, we sound incredible. I love playing with IEMs but it takes a lot of setup, and for small gigs it’d be nice not having to rely on them. I really like to dial in a good FOH sound first. The IEMs are a nice "this is what we COULD sound like" reference point however.
Ideas? I’ve attached a diagram of how the practice space looked last night. How might you have done things differently if this is what you had to work with?
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