Many thanks from a Mk 2 owner! Love being able to dial in more highs and high mids but no shrillex!
I have one band I gig with where the leader hates anything that isn't a real amp, so she makes me use one. Broke out my old pedal board and my Glaswerks combo, and yes, everything still sounds great there, too. But that rig is a three-trick pony, much heavier, harder to get many great effects, and the audiences' sonic experience is not as good as using my magic black box. My AxeFX is the best bang for the buck I have ever spent on music gear.
Set up your amp rig, but use the Fractal anyways, and see if she comments on how good the sound is. I remember reading about one of Keith Urban's guitarists doing something similar. After he was using a Fractal, he started to get compliments on his awesome tone, because people thought they were complimenting a nice "real amp" signal chain. Had they known it was digital, they would have been less likely to say anything positive.
+1
I think that I've posted about this in the past, but one of the artist that I back was like that once "I don't wanna see any digital amps on my stage they just don't sound right ! Bring a rocking tube amp if you want to play with me".
As misinformed as he was he is a cool guy and a great artist that I feel honored to work with, so I used a tube amp on his shows, but set up the Axe Fx 2 as a virtual pedal board to use with the tube amp.
Sounded really awesome and I didn't have to bring a spare amp as I had my Axe Fx 2 there as a back up.
One of the sound guys heard my Axe Fx tones once where I were early for setup an soundcheck and he absolutely freaked when he heard them and wanted me to go direct.
I didn't go direct at that gig, but what I did for the next gig was to bring a different tube amp that I set up on stage and then played the Axe Fx 2 direct.
The artist and a few other in the band commented afterward that they really liked my tones and said that the "new" tube amp sounded as good or better than the one I normally played and seemed to be much more flexible for getting different tones and different shades of clean to driven tones
We did that trick for a number of shows, and then one day as we were ending our sound check the artist said that he had heard from another artist that I play with that my Axe Fx rig sounded spectacular and that I'd done and entire tour with him on the Axe with no hiccups, so he said to me that if I dialed my Axe in for this band we could try it out shortly on the sound check for the next show and see if it sounded good enough.
That's when the sound guy asked the artist if he could spot the mic on my amp cabinet, there wasn't any and the artist looked absolutely puzzled for a moment until he just smiled and said "so you never really played that new and better tube amp did you ? - well played guys, looks like you can teach an old dog new tricks after all"
He has the crew put a vintage looking Marshall (dummy) stack behind me purely for aesthetics, but I've played my Axe Fx 2 direct with him since.
