Axe FX III one day review from long time Ultra owner.

J

JWDubois

Inspired
After owning an Ultra for about ten years, I finally dug out my wallet and bought a III. I came close to buying a II on many occasions but I never felt a burning need to upgrade because the Ultra always did what I needed it to do. I lurked here and at The Gripe Page just to keep track of what was going on.

Anyway, I ordered the III on Sunday and got it Thursday. Thanks to Fractal for making that go smoothly.

When I fired it up, I was surprised at the silence. The Ultra sounds like a jet warming up (I never got around to replacing the fan), but the III is completely silent. Zero fan noise, zero hum or hiss, even with my guitar plugged in, even after I disabled the noise gate.

I’ve gone through most of the presets and found that the cleans and mid gains are perfect. The mid gains are particularly inspiring. However, whoever did the presets has a different idea of lead sound than me. I’m not a fan of the completely dry, mid focused V30 + SM57 in your face sort of tone, which is how most of the crunch and lead presets seem to be done. I’m after the softer EJ sort of sound.

So I dove into the editor, via the front panel. The editing concepts and functions are close enough to the Ultra that I was able to quickly find my way around. I went straight to the cabs. Holy smokes, you read about 2000 cabs, but it’s quite another thing to audition them. The cab filter is a great tool. I wish it could filter on mics as well as cab type. Anyway, after putzing around for a while I found what I needed in the legacy cab bank, my tried and true cabs from the Ultra were there. They’ll do me until I find some new combinations.

After I put in the cabs I liked I played around a bit with the cab mic, did a couple of tweaks to the amp, a JTM45 I think, messed around with a drive, added a bit of reverb, and bang got a great EJ lead tone. No extra eq at all and no deep parameter dives. The lead sound is much brighter and up front than I could ever get with the Ultra, but it’s not harsh at all. I’m happy, especially since I can tell there’s a lot more that I can get.

All the effects are really seem to be a big step up. The new drives are very nice. I love the new reverbs, they’re so clear it seems like I can use a lot more reverb than the Ultra without burying the tone.

Anyway, back to the music room, I have about 300 amps to audition. ;-)
 
Wow kewl story, I hope to make a similar story happen too, however i'm not coming from an Ultra or modeler, but an all tube amp background, so hope I can make it work for me. Thanks for the post!!
 
Congratulations! That is a huge step, skipping the II and the major firmware revisions of the III on the travel
 
Piing said:
Congratulations! That is a huge step, skipping the II and the major firmware revisions of the III on the travel
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I hope I don’t get flamed for this, but the jump from the Ultra was not as quite big as I was expecting. I think most people have forgotten how good the Ultra was, and I have mine tweaked to the nth degree.

The III is clearly a step beyond though.

Edit: I was having a bit of trouble with the stock IRs. There were so many, but I don't really like single mic IRs and I wasn’t having a lot of luck mixing them. (That seems to be a whole art of its own that I need to learn). So I grabbed the OwnHammer Green Vintage set, which features a bunch of mixes, and then noticed that the Fractal Cab bundle was marked down to $10 and grabbed that too. Between the two, I’ve found several mixes that sound really great, much better than I was getting on my own.

Edit: I’m flaming myself. After a bit of auditioning with the IRs I’m getting way better sounds that I ever got out of the Ultra. The top end is much more clear. I could never get rid of the “blanket” with the Ultra on higher gain stuff, there was always a really big difference in clarity between low gain and high gain, but not anymore.
 
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JWDubois said:
I think most people have forgotten how good the Ultra was, and I have mine tweaked to the nth degree.
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The Ultra still sounds amazing, however the III is so much quicker and easier to dial in IMO. I spent a lot more time fine tuning the Ultra when I add one whereas with the III it's mostly wah/amp/cab/delay/verb and GO.

Awesome to hear you're enjoying it!
 
I did a bass patch this weekend, eight scenes with seven amps.

Ampeg Porta
SVT1
SVT2
Fuzzy Bassman
Mesa1
Mesa2
Tube Pre 1
Tube Pre 2

I am really digging patch/scenes/channels. Other than all the refinement, this is my favorite new (to me) feature.
 
GrindcoreHank said:
Try the Friedman amp models. You'll thank me later for this tip, lol.
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The Friedmans were just about the first ones I tried, since the HBE was my go to high gain in the Ultra. I found them to be quite a bit different from the BE and HBE in the Ultra, but I didn't have any good cab combos sorted out yet at the time.

I've really just scratched the amps. I've been spending a lot more time with the cabs. Now that I have some better cab combos sorted out I can spend more time with the amps.

The only amps I've looked at any detail so far are a few of the Plexies, the Bogner Shiva, and one of the Soldanos, which are sort of my wheelhouse tone and gain wise. I'm liking the Plexies a lot more than the Ultra, and I'm really liking the Shiva.

I can't wait to get started on all the booteek amps. I'll get back to the BE and HBE as well.

It's going to take weeks just to properly audition this thing, much less make any headway on a patch set. I haven't even made it through all the presets yet.
 
Well, I can admit when I was wrong.

Last night I was getting crunch and lead sounds better than I’ve ever imagined getting. Way better than I ever got out of the Ultra. The clarity and touch sensitivity is amazing. And I still feel like it can get a lot better as I get better with the cab block.

I tried a parallel fx routing, maintaining a center dry path. With the Ultra, I could never hear much difference between a parallel and series routing. But with the III I can clearly hear the dry guitar in the center even with gobs of reverb and delay on the sides.

Not practical to record, but glorious to noodle with. I'm willing to go out on a limb and state that it's possible that tone is actually somewhere other than the fingers. ;)

yyz67 said:
Cool. Care to share (or put on Axechange)?
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I need to work on it some more. I found a bass amp I missed, the Orange. I'll put it in place of one of the tube pres. I think I used cabs from the Fractal cab pack. I’ll have to replace them with stock cabs before I post it. I also need to level the scenes a bit better.

I also need to check the eq, I run a sub with my monitors, so it might sound too thin for anyone running without a sub. I actually cut the bass quite a bit as I recall. Maybe the thing to do would be make a copy so I could have versions eq'd with and without the sub.
 
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JWDubois said:
After owning an Ultra for about ten years, I finally dug out my wallet and bought a III. I came close to buying a II on many occasions but I never felt a burning need to upgrade because the Ultra always did what I needed it to do. I lurked here and at The Gripe Page just to keep track of what was going on.
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Inspired. Just took delivery on my FX III. Ready to hook up my FRFR's and give it a whirl!
 
Ozborne said:
Inspired. Just took delivery on my FX III. Ready to hook up my FRFR's and give it a whirl!
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It's all in the IRs, more so the higher gain you go. When you find the right one it explodes. I found what I was looking for in the "Legacy" cab folder. Lots of good pre-mixed IRs there, which are the ticket for quick results IMO.

Also, check out the output compression setting in the amp block output compression page. Really makes it feel good.
 
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