jsletner
Experienced
Hi everyone. I emailed a friend of mine who had inquired about having lunch and how I liked my Axe FX II. He's considering what to buy next. He's currently playing through an Eleven and considering a Kemper. I got rather long winded so I thought it might be worth posting on the forum. Forgive me if my imagination ran away a little at times, but I am really enthusiastic about my Axe Fx II.
Mark,
Sounds great, that is lunch next week and the Axe Fx II.
Ok here we go.
The Axe was good before, but its amazing now. Before the low end could be a little flubby if you didn’t know how to tweak it and even then maybe still a little loose. Now its tight. The proximity adjustment for the cab mic yields great results...just like a real mic moved around would. Of course you can use RideWirez or other 3rd party IRs if you want but I find the ones built in are fine. Using a 4x12 cab sim through my 1x12 AccuGroove at practice the other night and it sounded and felt like it was moving air like a 4x12. I couldn’t believe it. Imagine when I run them in stereo.
I jammed with Nathan, Seth, Jason Shroeder and Jason Fator last Friday night and it kept up with Jason’s JCM800 with 4x12 cab with no problem. Seth played through it with one of Jason’s custom built Teles (gotta get one) for most of the night rather than his Fender Deluxe and he liked it a lot. He also commented on the low end thump and tight bass. It also a has a nice chime when using the Vox AC30, Fender and Matchless sims.
It does sound and feel better than the Ultra partly due to more processing power and better algorithms I assume and partly due to the fact that the default setting of each amp now sounds great right from the factory. With the Ultra it required more tweaking. It’s sort of like my Suhr Badger which Seth says “doesn’t have a bad sound in it” Now with Axe when you change the bass, middle, treble, gain or master it responds the way you would expect it to. You don’t have to use as much caution now. You can still go deep, deeper if you want to, but you don’t need to. All the good sounds are right up front.
Which brings me to something I’ve become more and more convinced of lately. I don’t think the idea of trying to match tube amps is even an issue any more or won’t be much longer. I believe that in the near future most guitar players will have forgotten about tube amps, except as collectables. Whatever it is we love about tube amps can in the near future (or possibly now) be replicated or exceeded. More note bloom, more squishy, more chime...whatever.
The second thing I’m convinced of is the importance of what you play through. Of course if you are just recording this is irrelevant. If you use it live it’s critical. The atomic monitors I had colored the sound in an undesirable way for me and yet they are still very popular. Our PA speakers give it an “ice picky” sound which I don’t like. The RMC speakers even make my Suhr Badger miced up sound similarly bad. Lot’s of guys think you need to run it through a tube amp. I disagree. A good solid state amp is fine. What you need is good speakers. There are many that are “FRFR” but they still color the sound. I guess all speakers do, but my AccuGroove Tri 112-L speakers are flat and more importantly “natural” sounding (Thank you Marc Cooper or I may have never known) No matter what device you end up creating your sound with, the speakers are going to be the last thing it goes through, besides air, before it hits your ears.
Another thing that’s important regardless if use Line 6, Eleven, Kemper, Axe Fx, or whatever, is deciding what you’re going for. Ie. “In the room sound” or control room sound. Do you want it to sound like you’re standing in front of your amp, loud, with your pants moving and guitar giving you singing feedback with no mic or do you want to hear what its going to sound like on a recording ie; through a mic, compressed, added ambience, eqed to fit in the mix, etc. I think some of the confusion on the forums is coming from people that don’t know what they really want or don’t have the gear necessary to produce it live. Sometimes they want a huge sound and also to have it fit in the mix which is impossible unless your recording a solo guitar part. Good recording sounds are relatively easy now and can probably be created by any number of devices, although I still think the Axe is best.
Anyway with all the options of the Axe I can have pretty much anything I want. I mainly use the Marshalls, Dr. Z, Dumble, Matchless and Trainwreck sims with a variety of different cab IRs. I have a couple of presets where the Dumble is on one side and the TrainWreck on the other, or a Dr. Z and a Dumble, or...The TrainWreck is amazingly responsive (like the real amp is known to be) it goes from a beautiful clean tone , to a crunch tone, to a nice warm distortion, to HUGE just by changing the guitar volume or pickups.
By the way Dweezil posted that Guthrie Govan came on stage and jammed with him recently and played through his Axe FX. Guthrie ordered one soon afterwards. A lot of "names" are using them now, Petrucci being one (he just got his second one I hear). I couldn’t list them all but Nathan knows quite a few.
What I understand of Cliff’s idea of modeling individual components of an amplifier and then combining them into a virtual circuit makes the most sense of anything I’ve ever heard or thought about. It’s kind of like the Matrix movie. If you cut open Neo in the Matrix you would see that he had a heart and lungs, etc. If you open up the virtual world of an Axe you would see tubes, rectifiers, etc. Every other system on the market that I know of by comparison is a snapshot or possibly to extend the metaphor a video, but no matter how good a snapshot it may be, its copying the sound and will not necessarily have the realism, depth and detail a virtual circuit/reality can have. Other methods are getting very close however and can fool most everyone, myself included.
In the digital world, imagine you take a picture of a human body. Now you know what a human body looks like from that from one angle. This is analogous to a POD I believe. Looks right from one angle only and you can’t feel it
imagine you take a detailed video of a human body. You would know what it looked like in every detail. Now imagine you did a sonogram of the body now you would know a lot more about it, including a little about what's inside. You might even know a little about what it feels like. This is more analogous to what Kemper is doing I believe.
Now imagine you built all the parts of the body, heart lungs, liver, kidneys, intestines, each with great detail and assembled them into a body. This is analogous to the Axe Fx.
Can other products compete with it? Sure. I just like the Fractal paradigm a lot. It makes sense to me, doesn’t seem gimmicky and it works really well.
This was such a long email I think I’ll copy and paste it onto the forum after I change the names to protect the innocent/guilty.
Jim
Mark,
Sounds great, that is lunch next week and the Axe Fx II.
Ok here we go.
The Axe was good before, but its amazing now. Before the low end could be a little flubby if you didn’t know how to tweak it and even then maybe still a little loose. Now its tight. The proximity adjustment for the cab mic yields great results...just like a real mic moved around would. Of course you can use RideWirez or other 3rd party IRs if you want but I find the ones built in are fine. Using a 4x12 cab sim through my 1x12 AccuGroove at practice the other night and it sounded and felt like it was moving air like a 4x12. I couldn’t believe it. Imagine when I run them in stereo.
I jammed with Nathan, Seth, Jason Shroeder and Jason Fator last Friday night and it kept up with Jason’s JCM800 with 4x12 cab with no problem. Seth played through it with one of Jason’s custom built Teles (gotta get one) for most of the night rather than his Fender Deluxe and he liked it a lot. He also commented on the low end thump and tight bass. It also a has a nice chime when using the Vox AC30, Fender and Matchless sims.
It does sound and feel better than the Ultra partly due to more processing power and better algorithms I assume and partly due to the fact that the default setting of each amp now sounds great right from the factory. With the Ultra it required more tweaking. It’s sort of like my Suhr Badger which Seth says “doesn’t have a bad sound in it” Now with Axe when you change the bass, middle, treble, gain or master it responds the way you would expect it to. You don’t have to use as much caution now. You can still go deep, deeper if you want to, but you don’t need to. All the good sounds are right up front.
Which brings me to something I’ve become more and more convinced of lately. I don’t think the idea of trying to match tube amps is even an issue any more or won’t be much longer. I believe that in the near future most guitar players will have forgotten about tube amps, except as collectables. Whatever it is we love about tube amps can in the near future (or possibly now) be replicated or exceeded. More note bloom, more squishy, more chime...whatever.
The second thing I’m convinced of is the importance of what you play through. Of course if you are just recording this is irrelevant. If you use it live it’s critical. The atomic monitors I had colored the sound in an undesirable way for me and yet they are still very popular. Our PA speakers give it an “ice picky” sound which I don’t like. The RMC speakers even make my Suhr Badger miced up sound similarly bad. Lot’s of guys think you need to run it through a tube amp. I disagree. A good solid state amp is fine. What you need is good speakers. There are many that are “FRFR” but they still color the sound. I guess all speakers do, but my AccuGroove Tri 112-L speakers are flat and more importantly “natural” sounding (Thank you Marc Cooper or I may have never known) No matter what device you end up creating your sound with, the speakers are going to be the last thing it goes through, besides air, before it hits your ears.
Another thing that’s important regardless if use Line 6, Eleven, Kemper, Axe Fx, or whatever, is deciding what you’re going for. Ie. “In the room sound” or control room sound. Do you want it to sound like you’re standing in front of your amp, loud, with your pants moving and guitar giving you singing feedback with no mic or do you want to hear what its going to sound like on a recording ie; through a mic, compressed, added ambience, eqed to fit in the mix, etc. I think some of the confusion on the forums is coming from people that don’t know what they really want or don’t have the gear necessary to produce it live. Sometimes they want a huge sound and also to have it fit in the mix which is impossible unless your recording a solo guitar part. Good recording sounds are relatively easy now and can probably be created by any number of devices, although I still think the Axe is best.
Anyway with all the options of the Axe I can have pretty much anything I want. I mainly use the Marshalls, Dr. Z, Dumble, Matchless and Trainwreck sims with a variety of different cab IRs. I have a couple of presets where the Dumble is on one side and the TrainWreck on the other, or a Dr. Z and a Dumble, or...The TrainWreck is amazingly responsive (like the real amp is known to be) it goes from a beautiful clean tone , to a crunch tone, to a nice warm distortion, to HUGE just by changing the guitar volume or pickups.
By the way Dweezil posted that Guthrie Govan came on stage and jammed with him recently and played through his Axe FX. Guthrie ordered one soon afterwards. A lot of "names" are using them now, Petrucci being one (he just got his second one I hear). I couldn’t list them all but Nathan knows quite a few.
What I understand of Cliff’s idea of modeling individual components of an amplifier and then combining them into a virtual circuit makes the most sense of anything I’ve ever heard or thought about. It’s kind of like the Matrix movie. If you cut open Neo in the Matrix you would see that he had a heart and lungs, etc. If you open up the virtual world of an Axe you would see tubes, rectifiers, etc. Every other system on the market that I know of by comparison is a snapshot or possibly to extend the metaphor a video, but no matter how good a snapshot it may be, its copying the sound and will not necessarily have the realism, depth and detail a virtual circuit/reality can have. Other methods are getting very close however and can fool most everyone, myself included.
In the digital world, imagine you take a picture of a human body. Now you know what a human body looks like from that from one angle. This is analogous to a POD I believe. Looks right from one angle only and you can’t feel it
imagine you take a detailed video of a human body. You would know what it looked like in every detail. Now imagine you did a sonogram of the body now you would know a lot more about it, including a little about what's inside. You might even know a little about what it feels like. This is more analogous to what Kemper is doing I believe.
Now imagine you built all the parts of the body, heart lungs, liver, kidneys, intestines, each with great detail and assembled them into a body. This is analogous to the Axe Fx.
Can other products compete with it? Sure. I just like the Fractal paradigm a lot. It makes sense to me, doesn’t seem gimmicky and it works really well.
This was such a long email I think I’ll copy and paste it onto the forum after I change the names to protect the innocent/guilty.
Jim
