AFIII Demos of Axe-Fx III nailing Jimmy Page-type recorded guitar sounds - from AustinBuddy's Brit Rock Royalty TonePack #1

austinbuddy

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If you know someone who says you just can't get true, faithful and accurate classic recorded rock guitar tones from an Axe-Fx III -- well they don't know what they are talking about!

Here's proof: two AustinBuddy Brit Rock Royalty TonePack #1 demo videos below. These are in stereo with correct panning. The guitar parts were played by Kyle Crusham or Jason Mozersky here in Austin Texas, who helped me put this TonePack together.

Hope you enjoy them! Covering examples from albums I and II:





Covering examples from albums III and IV:




It was so much fun and an education (mixing school!) putting these together. We did all 36 songs (presets) with over 150 guitar parts (scenes) for this. Enjoy!
 
Incredible work as always, thank you for your continued talent and contributions to this wonderful product that we all enjoy.

Question: Have you tried porting theses presets to the AX8? If so, what were the results? Are there limitations with the AX8 that deem the work involved not worth the time and effort or the results not up to being satisfactory?

Nathan: the short answer is "yes" to both. :D

Here are some of the issues in porting this over to the Ax8:

  • Cliff may be working on an ARES 2.0 version for Ax8. If he is, I want to wait for that to come to start on this. No point doing something for Ax8 10.01 if everyone is going to use ARES for Ax8.

  • The Axe-Fx III's preset and scene structure lets you do a single song and 8 scenes in one preset, and name the scenes. I can have up to 8 different amps in a single preset to cover the parts - which is awesome. All you do to play along is switch scenes, with no drop-out. That's not the case on an Ax8. I can only have 2 amp sounds per preset on an Ax8 (and up to four for an Axe-Fx II). So one song ported to Ax8 means I might need up to 4 presets to cover 8 scenes and one song, and there will be drop out when switching presets. Plus I can't name the scenes in AX8, you'd have to use a written guide with it rather than look at the hardware screen to know what's what.

  • More cab choices in the Axe-III than Ax8. I do provide some User Cab IRs and some of them we shot for this ( a U67 in a room) and included and some are in my/Fractal Audio's AustinBuddy Cab Packs.

  • CPU limitation issues may be an issues for some sounds.

  • Can't use Cab Block's preamp -- not available in Ax8. Essential to some of the sounds - Page went direct many times with no amp!

  • Drive blocks in AxeIII are improved and have a 10 band GEQ. I could pull out a transitor-y buzz and fuzzy stuff by manipulating various things I can't do in an AX8.

  • No Analog compressor choice in the Ax8 -- I love that and use that a lot to emulate an 1176 style compressor. Plus, you only get ONE compressor block in an Ax8 and for some sounds you need two compressor blocks.

  • I needed a lot of volume blocks for stereo version to cover panning shifts from scene to scene - can't do so many in Ax8. Probably work arounds for that.

  • Ax8 GEQ does not have X/Y -- so you have to use two blocks if you have a GEQ shift in a scene change. There is a LOT of EQ on those tones simulating what was happening at the mixing board.

All that said, I do want to produce a version for both the Ax8 and the Axe-Fx II (the latter of which can address many of the above). It's all in my work queue, which, with all the great firm updates happening these days, is pretty much taking up all my available time (that plus a 200+ Bass TonePack I'm just about done with for the Ax8 and should be out before end of month).

Sorry for long answer - but it's a very good question. We also need to get started working on albums five and above for Brit Rock Royalty TonePack #2, so the whole catalogue will be covered/available!
 
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@austinbuddy

Any chance you could include some dry tracks of each guitar you used? It would be really helpful because then we could tweak our dry guitars to sound closer to the guitars you used to make the presets.
 
Loved the demos. What did it for me, was the rhythm Les Paul at about 1:31 in Demo #2, playing - that light breakup overdrive. Very authentic - well done, young man!

Thank you. The real fun for me was having good musicians play along with the real tracks as I dialed presets in and blending the preset sound with the real tracks — so much they/we really couldn’t tell the difference. Then we knew it was right.

That process was a like a producer master class in guitar arranging and blending tones/sounds to final result.

If you listen to Celebration Day, there are seven guitars and an 8 string bass in that. Beginning of Page’s “guitar orchestra” journey. Lot going on!
 
What did it for me, was the rhythm Les Paul at about 1:31 in Demo #2, playing - that light breakup overdrive.
If you listen carefully to the real stuff, it's not that overdriven, and some of it is actually clean into a board or compressor. I love that specific tune so much - it was fun putting together the harmony notes too (you can play 1 note and it will do the harmonies for you!).
 
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