Allan Holdsworth Leads sound so liquid, right?

I’d have to look again, I believe he used the sequencer in the Streets preset to control the synth block. It opened my mind.
 
Another thing with buying presets is that they probably won't sound the way they are supposed to sound when you update to a newer firmware. Unless the maker/seller constantly updates the presets each major fw update. Some sellers do that I think. But eventually that will stop.
 
Bodde said:
Another thing with buying presets is that they probably won't sound the way they are supposed to sound when you update to a newer firmware. Unless the maker/seller constantly updates the presets each major fw update. Some sellers do that I think. But eventually that will stop.
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Same thing would happen to presets you make yourself, yes?
 
Andy Eagle said:
You are actually seeing a bunch of pedals that don't sound similar being made to sound almost the same by the playing style of the guitarist.
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Not really, you're hearing pedals tweaked to sound similar recorded by an iphone. If we were in the room during the shooting of the video, or if it were recorded in a more "professional" manner, it would more than likely sound much different.

I am not negating the impact that a player's technique and style has on their sound. Everyone has a style and that is what's "in their fingers". There is a core tone that has to be present. Here's a clip of a video Mike Soldano did when talking about one of his newer amps in which he tells a story of working on Eddie's amp:

TLDR; Mike admits not having Eddie's chops but knew when he found that tone.

 
Guy on another forum said:

“I also have a friend who toured with Allan Holdsworth, I had no idea, I actually found out googling trying to find Holdsworth's tone setup. So today I drew a little diagram of Holdsworth's ca. 2013 live setup.”

i asked if I could share it and he said:

“Go ahead, just as a heads up, I added the m143 pedal in there on the clean signal because I saw it in a photo, not sure if it goes there. The rest is pretty solid.”

so here it is. Good luck with the knobs!

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(Sorry to quasi-necrobump this thread)

I picked up the J. Rockett pedal a while back and I was really impressed with how great it sounds as an overdrive but also surprised by how un-Holdsworth-like it sounded. I suppose it makes sense because he used the TC booster/distortion into a Magicstomp preamp patch, so the booster/overdrive (which is what the J. Rockett is) is only half of the equation. I ended up loving the pedal so much as its own, separate thing that I have two of them; one for each pedalboard. It's a fantastic sounding overdrive that goes from very clean to a fair amount of grit, all with some really powerful and musical EQ controls. The booster side helps push the overdrive into thicker territory and also works as a great clean boost on its own. They're discontinued now, but you can find them for sale here and there still.

Also, I just put together an FM3 patch for Allan's sounds. I have a couple of Magicstomps laying around (I was using them for a backup/fly rig for a while - amazing little units considering how old they are) so I loaded up the Holdsworth presets and copied the delays and lead preamp tone over as closely as I could. You should be able to port it to the AxeIII with FracTool easily. Because I was running up against CPU limits, I'd recommend making a few changes:

1) I didn't have enough CPU for the plexdelay shimmerverb, so I settled on a volume block with auto-swell, the pitch block set to crystals, and a large reverb. The shimmerverb has a smoother sound, though, that's more like Allan's on "House of Mirrors."

2) Since the FM3 only has one amp and one cab block, I could do the parallel clean/lead signal path. I'd recommend copying channel B from the amp and cab blocks into an amp2 and cab2, then setting up another volume block after. You could keep two separate volume blocks assigned to expression pedals as Allan did, or another idea would be to assign both to the same expression pedal and invert the modifier curve on one of them so it's heel for clean, toe for distortion (or vice versa).

3) You might get a little more clarity in the lead tone by placing an FET boost drive block in front of the lead amp and lowering the input drive of the amp a bit. It's pretty good as is, and the difference is pretty subtle. I just didn't have the CPU left for anything more. The patch is pretty much red-lining as it is.

Otherwise, this patch is all factory cabs with external 1 assigned to volume1. The cabs and pitch-shift effects are panned pretty hard, so be sure to either be using a stereo setup or a sum-to-mono output.
 

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