Going to give it a try

Reade

Reade

Inspired
A few years ago my amp was burned in a church arson fire. The amp had a cover on it and the cover took most of the heat and melted etc., the amp under got smoke damage and soot filled the insides. There was doubt it would ever work again.

The church did give me insurance money to cover the amp. Using that I bought an AxeFx and had only used it at home. Last night I finally moved it to the church to give it a real honest try. Right off I noticed it didn’t sound as good to me on stage as my amp but I recorded a loop of both clean and overdriven tones and walked out into the room to listen to the mains and tweak the gain and eq on the board. In the mains it sounded far better than I was expecting.

Right now I’ve got output 1 going to the board and 2 feeding an Atomic CLR on stage. The CLR seemed boomy compared to at home so I went into the global eq and took off 3 dB @ 60 and 2 @ 150. The board is flat.

Any input or advice from other users would be nice and appreciated.
 
To me the real question is, how does it sound in the mix? I mean, not just any mix, but the mix with your mates at the church, and with the normal sound guy.

It's pretty easy to get a good sounding tone stand-alone, but quite another thing to have it fit well with the other tones/playing styles/mixing style in the band.
 
A good live rig is miles away from a good home rig. To expect one to handle like the other is an exercise in futility and the source of many a guitar player complaining that amp X or pedal Y doesn't sound right, endless rig purchases and why pros go to people like Bob Bradshaw or Pete Cornish.

Optimize your rig for what you consider most important, and accept that it will sound less in other roles. Maybe even create different presets for at home altogether?

jakel said:
To me the real question is, how does it sound in the mix? I mean, not just any mix, but the mix with your mates at the church, and with the normal sound guy.

It's pretty easy to get a good sounding tone stand-alone, but quite another thing to have it fit well with the other tones/playing styles/mixing style in the band.
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I see no small number of threads of people who insist on having great stage sound and spent endlessly on that. For me the question would be, does it A: sound good in the mix? B: can you hear yourself on stage? Then C: does it even matter how it sounds on stage?
 
I can’t akways count on the sound person to mute my channel. Is there a way for me to make sure it doesn’t pop in the mains when I turn it off?
 
I remembered a XLR cable with an on/off switch on it. I went down and hooked it up on the Axe and it works at least for me. I’m able to reach around and turn the switch and it goes silent and when I powered down no pop. Easy and free.


Is there anything wrong with doing this?
 
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Hope to get an answer if this is safe for the Axe, it seems to have solved the pop on power down issue but I don’t want to damage my unit.
 
Reade said:
I remembered a XLR cable with an on/off switch on it. I went down and hooked it up on the Axe and it works at least for me. I’m able to reach around and turn the switch and it goes silent and when I powered down no pop. Easy and free.
Is there anything wrong with doing this?
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should be fine, you'll just forget to do it a few times and will still drive you crazy. why i went with a sequential power strip, impossible to happen now; although the III pops less.
 
If it's boomy easiest fix is low cut in the cab block. Anywhere from 90hz up to even 200hz is common. I would recommend hi cut too 5-10k
 
I gave up on different speaker systems sounding the same. They don't and probably never will. (famous last words) I like my headphones the best so I'm going to buy a set for everybody in the audience and since I'm the whole audience I have already accomplished this goal. ;)
 
As far as creating patches that work in the mix, I've spent many hours coming up with great sounding presets on their own but have not used a single one while recording because they don't work in the mix. I'm going to start working up sounds while playing with different tracks even if they don't work alone. I used to horrify guitar players by adding severe high pass filtering while mixing and asking them if their guitars sounded good. After they concurred I would solo the track much to their dismay...WTF? That sounds like crap! Back in the mix and everyone was happy. This is something we all know but it is difficult to let go of all that lovely low mid and bottom end that gets masked anyway and clouds up a mix... Still it's all about balance....
 
I guess my biggest question is why are you powering down while the mains are on? is this during service or during load out? if it's the latter, just unplug the XLR first.
 
Muad'zin said:
“Optimize your rig for what you consider most important, and accept that it will sound less in other roles.”

Then C: does it even matter how it sounds on stage?
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Oh. My. God. I hear what you’re saying but must admit it’s anathema to my Old SoundMan Soul...

YES - it absolutely matters how it sounds on stage, since that’s where your entire performance starts. If your “instrument” doesn’t get you off when you’re performing then your performance is going to suffer - which means that EVERYONE gets less than what you’re capable of giving them, including you.

“Accept that it will sound less...”

NEVER accept “less” - but do everyone a favor and be sure all of your presets have the ability to easily shed LF/MR/HF depending on what your FOH (or especially your monitor mixer) may ask you for, and barring a truly inappropriate preset trust that they can use their own EQ etc. to get the result that they seek. The ability to control both level and center frequency of the LF/MR/HF filters in your preset will make you Extremely Popular if stage/FOH problems truly need a solution from your rig.

Cheers,
Bruce
 
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