Are you considering an Axe-FX ? Here is what I learned.

Greg Smith said:
Same here with many of the factory presets. I find that a lot of them sound dark and muddied. But there are a few that just jump out at me for my style of playing.
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Agreed. Adding 100-120hz of low cut helps a lot with the factory presets but my favorite way to test them is to pull up one of my favorite IRs.
 
Factory presets give me an idea of what the unit can do, I intend them as an extension of the manual. But I never use any of them.
 
I have a lot of guitars here. I’d be hard pressed to plug in any of them and come to the conclusion none of the factory presets sound good. I suspect one of a few things:

Ops monitoring environment is untreated, naturally leaving him with an inaccurate representation of the sounds. Writing his own compensates for room deficiencies and they instantly sound better. This situation doesn’t end well for the car test and beyond but if he never leaves that room, problem solved.
Op may have a narrow definition of good sound. It can be a very particular sound or type of sound not covered in the presets, or may be as simple as a frequency range he prefers attenuated or boosted he is not hearing. This can also of course be caused by my first suspicion, or he is just particularly sensitive to a certain frequency he wants to hear. Easily fixed a million different ways in the axefxIII.
I know sound and tone is subjective, but the factory presets cover such a tremendous range of sounds it simply isn’t true to say none of them sound good. A concert violinist may say that if they just don’t like the sound of an electric guitar. There is literally no way you can present bagpipes to me where I’ll think they sound good. I just do not like the instrument. If you are an electric guitar player, there has to be SOMETHING in the axefxIII that sounds good because the presets and the tools span the entire history of the instruments amplification and processing. Proven time and time again, quite accurately as well.
 
as ever, the cab block is the key for getting tones from okay to wonderful.

However, my trick is this :
I always choose IR, which has nice character and texture that I’m looking for. I don’t care if it’s not tight enough or it has too much hi end. I always set parametric eq after cab block.

for example : factory cab 4x12 German boutique in legacy bank has that mojo that I’m looking for, but it has a few things, which needs to be corrected.

So inside PEQ, I set lowcut to 100hz with 12db slope, 250hz -2,5db, 430hz -3db, 1000hz +1db, 2200hz +1,5db with Q’s set to taste.

Now I have IR, that I can use with most hi gain amps in stock settings and it just sound glorious.
 
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