A Common Axe-FX complaint:

I don't care for the insinuations that I am down on my AFX or am trying to 'dis' it - I love my AFX Ultra, and use it a lot, yet I am not a fan boy or 'Fractal snob' (I'm not a Mac snob either). If I hear things that aren't ideal, and then speak to other users who have experienced the same, I post about it here. I do this because I believe there is enough collective smarts here to come up with some creative solutions - but if that doesn't work, I know Cliff can make the necessary tweaks to help us achieve the 'fattest sounds in modeling'. Fatness, Presence, and Urgency have always tended to be the 'missing links' in modeling...
 
I'm new to the AxeFx but for me, it's like wearing two hats.

First, you can tweak a patch from the player's perspective. This is all about getting attitude, grace, balls, whatever your particular muse is. In other words the thing that inspires you to play.

Second, the tools are there, in the box, to take that patch further. This for me is like changing hats and now thinking like a mixing engineer. For me it's a different mind set. For example, I might thin out a E GTR track to make it sit in the mix better etc.

It sounds to me like the factory patches have been approached that way, from a mixing engineers point of view. I actually really like several of them even though they don't seem to get much praise on this forum.

But the tools are there to mimic an amp and stop there. Or go deeper and create the final mix. It's a pretty amazing box.

- Richard
 
aleclee said:
Am I the only person whose initial reaction was "Fletcher Munson curve"?
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The "Fletcher Munson curve" is alive and well on planet Earth!!! Very important variable because of volume changes during both programming and performing.
 
northtrader said:
Glad you're still out there Radley..... haven't seen a post from you in quite some time. I agree with your opening post..... high fidelity, seems thin......
I also agree with Jay - it takes a masterful manipulation of EQ
and there in lies a huge hurdle - which Radley mentioned later (overdoing the amount of EQ available). The Axe-FX's high fidelity tones appear to be very sensitive to a plethora of EQ variables that make it difficult to translate tonal consistency across venues/set ups. I'm am 90% an FRFR guy that goes straight to the board (monitored with IEM's when they're available). Being an engineer, my tolerance for deviation from expectations is very low. If I create a tone that I like (with my PA equipment at home), it never ceases to annoy me when I get to a venue - tie into the FOH - play a riff into the looper and then stand in the "audience" and sigh because of all the time I will now need to spend tweaking before the gig - just to get to the tone where I felt it should have been to begin with.

It's been a three year journey, I can't see myself going back to a traditional amp set up, but I'll be honest: It's been surprisingly "thin" a lot more often than it's been surprising on the upside.

I tip my hat to all the guys out there who've reached tonal nirvana with their Axe-FX's.
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Let me start by saying that in no way am I trying to flame or be a jerk at all. My question is:
Why would you expect that the PA systems at different venues are going to reproduce your sound in the same way as your home PA system does?

The variables are enormous: different rooms with different ambiance, different boards, different speakers and monitors, different engineers who 'hype' different frequencies because they find them pleasing etc. ad nauseum. But these variables would all exist if you were a guitar+tube amp guy. Yes, the sound on stage might be closer to what you expect, but your mic'd up amp thru a strange PA would yield different results through the fronts for sure.

I think the Global EQ ABSOLUTELY HAS to become your best friend. It's a different skill set than just tweaking an amp, but it's a necessary thing IMHO. You have to get to the point where you can strum your first chord (or playback your first loop--even better because it frees up your hands) during sound check on a new stage and instinctively think "Ok, it needs more upper-mids and less lows" and make the change in 30 seconds or less. Any more than that and it becomes the sound engineers' business.

My advice would be to take your PA to different rooms in the house (or different houses or halls etc.) and practice "fast tweaking" with the Global EQ. Time is always of the essence during sound check. If you're a reverb guy, practice that too with the Global controls. It's very rare that you end up with LESS reverb than you need.... too much kills.

Anyway, with the guitar+amp setup you will NEVER have the amount of control that you do with the Axe-FX. Which means you have more control to make things sound REALLY crappy or REALLY awesome. So why wouldn't you want to be awesome?

Cheers,
-AL
 
I think, along w/ some of you, that it depends not just how you craft your patches, but what you use for an external power amp and speakers in a live situation....
I use my unit for live situations and for home use and recording. When I record w/ it or run it through my Adam A7 monitors, it sounds as I would expect: frickin' amazing and larger than life, right? Can I get an amen in hea'?

I've had to do a lot of experimenting, though, to get the live sound I want, and I'm still not done. Right now I use an acoustic image amp (high end transparent amp) and a raezer's edge cab (really a p.a. speaker in a ported cab) and it sounds pretty good. i find that i can use most cab sims and it sounds pretty good....
It sounds even better through a P.A. that has good horns, I've found... plus if you can run stereo, then it sounds that much better.

I'm in the process of upgrading my live rig. I'm either going to get a Fryette (VHT) 2/50/2 tube amp (because a lot of guys swear by these amps to give it more balls as you are wanting, but not diminishing the clarity of a good solid state amp), or I'm going to get a pair of high end powered loud speakers... I've been reading that more guys are going to the high end powered speaker approach...

I don't play high volume gigs, though, so I don't need a 100 watt tube amp punch into 2 4x12 cabs.... I mostly play gigs where 20 watts and one or two 12s is more than sufficient.

Any thoughts on this?
 
Radley said:
The "Fletcher Munson curve" is alive and well on planet Earth!!! Very important variable because of volume changes during both programming and performing.
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Usually a different effect happens with the Fletcher-Munson curve. You wind up pushing up the lows and highs at low volumes to compensate then when you turn up loud the tone can become both boomy and shrill.
 
sivadyert said:
When I record w/ it or run it through my Adam A7 monitors, it sounds as I would expect: frickin' amazing and larger than life, right? Can I get an amen in hea'?
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That says all that need be said. Your problem is not with the Axe-Fx, it is with your amplification.

Right now I use an acoustic image amp (high end transparent amp) and a raezer's edge cab (really a p.a. speaker in a ported cab) and it sounds pretty good.
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That rig is anything but transparent. If you improve on it substantially, your live sound will match what you've already demonstrated you can get from the Axe with neutral speakers.
 
Radley - do you feel that way, or is it just the other guitarists' opinion? Are they making this determination by monitoring via IEM or FOH?

The only thing I can offer is that I work as a media director at a church and have the opportunity to hear a handful of pretty good rigs --from a /13 to vintage Fender amps (and pretty good players to boot). I also play quite a bit as well. When listening back to our recordings I have to say in comparison my axe-fx in no way sounds thin or lacking in any way. Really the only thing lacking is my playing :)

Radley said:
...Example: Since I use my AFX Ultra almost exclusively direct to a mixing board or house system, I sometimes program patches using headphones (not ideal). I recently did this using a set of Sony phones that had become deficient in their HF response over the years, so when I tried the patches on a flat system, the high end was much too strong - it was a simple fix to start lowering the Transformer HF parameter until the frequency balance was smooth & fat.:eek: Don't be afraid to take the parameter all the way down into the 2k to 5k range if needed - I tend to prefer this over lowering the Presence level for fatness.
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Personally I don't think setting up patches using headphones is in your best interest. You're probably moving from venue to venue with different acoustics and monitoring solutions quite often so I imagine that may be your only option sometimes.

Good to see you're still out there. Haven't seen you post for a while and was wondering what you were up to.

matt
 
barhrecords said:
It sounds to me like the factory patches have been approached that way, from a mixing engineers point of view. I actually really like several of them even though they don't seem to get much praise on this forum.
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While I build patches completely from scratch, I still tour through the factory presets on occasion and do like many of them as well. And you're right, in that they are more representative of an entire studio chain and suited for FRFR systems.

Many factory patches are instructional as to how the many combinations of amps, FX, cabs, EQ, etc. can be configured to get the best out of any given chain, and I've been surprised a few times when I found a factory patch I really liked and then seeing how it was setup.
 
megalowmatt said:
Radley - do you feel that way, or is it just the other guitarists' opinion? Are they making this determination by monitoring via IEM or FOH?

The only thing I can offer is that I work as a media director at a church and have the opportunity to hear a handful of pretty good rigs --from a /13 to vintage Fender amps (and pretty good players to boot). I also play quite a bit as well. When listening back to our recordings I have to say in comparison my axe-fx in no way sounds thin or lacking in any way. Really the only thing lacking is my playing :)
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I only feel that way about a few of the stock amp models (with no effects or EQ) - as I discussed earlier, I have ways to fatten up almost any amp model to my liking. The models I wasn't crazy about seemed like the amp's EQ bands were a bit too narrow or 'pointed', if that makes any sense but again, there are still ways to get what I'm after. I have never played through many of the Amps modeled, so although some might sound a bit thin to me, they may actually be quite accurate - I like a lot of tight low end in most of my tones (even clean stuff), and not every amp can produce enough for me.
 
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For tighter low end, try turning up the power supply filtering of the amp by adjusting the "B+ cap" setting on the "Amp Geek" page. You can mess with the "Low Freq Resonance" and "Spkr Res Freq" and "XFormer Low Freq" settings, too. And of course, for actual real bass frequencies, headphones are totally incapable of producing them, so you'd want to play through some actual speakers if you want to know what's really going on in the low end. With headphones, I would expect cranking up the bass to compensate for headphones' inability to produce bass, which will result in a way too bass heavy tone which will mess things up pretty good. ;)
 
Oh and I've found that a nice way to adjust the balance of mids vs highs and lows is to use a filter block right before the output that's set for a bandpass with a freq in the mids (my lead tone is set just above 2k) and a very very low Q (0.12 on my lead tone). Lets you control the rolling off of the lows and highs, which as you can imagine gives the mids a more prominent role. Just make sure not to take out too much of the low or the high, obviously.
 
Scott - Thanks for the input :)... I especially like the last idea with the filter - it's almost like a 'Fletcher-Munsen offset' control! :eek:
 
I have almost no problem getting thick realistic tones with testosterone to spare, even the low to mid gain stuff. I've spent a LOT of time working on my favorite presets though. I know a lot of people are able to simply dial up the right amp model and cab model and they are good to go, even without eq. I am not fortunate enough to be in that camp. I play around with IRs and especially eq seemingly forever until I get a result that really puts a smile on my face. But, and this is the only thing that matters to me, I can and do get there, every time.

The main obstacle, which is surmountable times exactly ten, is not being able to find a stock IR that does the job for a particular tone. I can't offer anyone practical advice, because most of my preset creation involves splitting hairs over eq.
 
Me too....

steadystate said:
I know a lot of people are able to simply dial up the right amp model and cab model and they are good to go, even without eq. I am not fortunate enough to be in that camp...
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SS - Neither am I, and I hereby confess it! :) This is one reason I would love to see how Mr. Lincoln Brewster approaches the AFX. He is not only a fine guitarist, but also a very good engineer & mixer....that's the kind of guy who would have a lot of useful insight into the particulars/complexities of programming the AFX to get the most 'usable' sounds! :)
 
This may seem counterintuitive, but a good way to get some balls in your tone is to go to the advanced tab for the amp block and restrict the bandwidth with the low cut and high cut. Try 70-5k range as starter. For even better balls, you can push it hard with a FET block in the front (low drive, high output) and do the same ~70-5k bandwidth choke in front of the amp too. Even small changes in these values can be a very audible tone difference so adjust to taste.

If you want a lot of cut and character, like a Keith Richards tone, try a 800 sim. Keep the bright switch on, but reduce all the other tone controls and the drive down in the 9-10 o'clock range or to taste, and leave the master relatively high. You can get good Blackmore tones this way too.

Now run at band volume and you will stand out with a more up-front sound than stock amp settings.

You don't need to use the PEQs for this. Save them for something else. You can use stock IRs, like the 4x12 25w, with good results.
 
tubetonez said:
What I notice with a lot of the gainy amp models is that it will sound fat when playing chords and notes in the lower register, moving up the neck for leads it can get ice-picky.
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Of the hundreds of guitar players I've worked with, there are only two or three who don't have this problem.
 
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