Bedroom Players Vs. "Pros" & the Blanket complaint

OwenTheBrit said:
I have had 1 week with the Axe Fx II and my search for some kind of happiness with it has lead me to many posts that mention the "Blanket" issue....So my topic for discussion is...Do you think the Blanket Issue is experienced mainly by people like myself, who are OK musicians, been in a band or two & play out twice a year, but have spent most of their lives playing in the bedroom using cheap solid state amps (dreaming of wearing chains and a cool bandanna). Are we buying the Axe to try to recreate studio Hi-Fi guitar solo's which might be unrealistic ?
(personally going for Petrucci - "This is the Life" sound)

And on the other hand are people that are feeling the joy, guys who have been around a bit, played more at high volume, always with tubes and understand the differences between playing in your bedroom and a room with 100 people in it, and/or real recording ?

My old rig is ....Ibanez JS1200 & Egen18, Digitech Rp1000, Crate Power Block ( no don't laugh...its sounds good). The reason I bought the Axe Fx is I want more. more Sustain , more HiFi, more creamy smoothness, more Tightness at the bottom end...more, more, more...I'm an average to good guitar player...By some gear to make me better ...Right ?

At the moment I'm not exceeding my old sound and i'm exhausted from tweaking & reading posts ! , I don't seem to play guitar anymore...I'm just trying to not sound crap, like I am 13 again, playing "Smoke on the Water" through my Dad's old record player amp.

So please chip in and continue the conversation...but this post has 2 purposes
1. A great discussion which should provide learning to all
2. I NEED HELP !!!!!!! ...advice ...a mentor , patches, IR's...anything

Thanks Guys
Owen


Playing the Axe through KRK Studio Monitors or a PA System ...Both with disappointing results
Pro Tools for recording
Ibanez JS1200
Ibanez Egen18
Ibanez Jem
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I haven't read the entire thread but I will comment anyway.
I too play in my bedroom. I am average in my ability and ambitious in my creation. I too have KRK monitors and I too had this thing that people call the blanket effect. I considered it too be lacking in attack and presence and in your faceness.

My findings over the last 10 months were ...

The stock IRs were not what I was looking for. The moment I bought a cab pack with a whole selections of IRs that catered for my brightness needs I was heading in the right direction for my own tastes.

Its more about the microphone and microphone placement while capturing the IR than what speaker or cabinet it's capturing. Learn the characteristics of different microphones.

I only bother with a single cab block .None of that doubling up for me.

Boogie tones are hard to dial in.

I couldn't/can't stop tweaking . Just stop tweaking and play or you'll get rusty!

I was aiming for perfection but what is perfection?

My room modes were causing utter havoc on my ears and now I know about them I can compensate. This has made the world of difference alone. I used REW to make an IR that tames the problems in my room. Now I can use boogie tones and find most of my tones were actually over bright!

I always use high and low cut in the cab block. 80hz and 7500hz-10000hz depending on what I want.

I'm currently think about building some custom rock wool bass traps and maybe a diffusion thing to hang on the wall. Those room modes matter.....a lot!
 
HarrySound said:
I haven't read the entire thread but I will comment anyway.
I too play in my bedroom. I am average in my ability and ambitious in my creation. I too have KRK monitors and I too had this thing that people call the blanket effect. I considered it too be lacking in attack and presence and in your faceness.

My findings over the last 10 months were ...

The stock IRs were not what I was looking for. The moment I bought a cab pack with a whole selections of IRs that catered for my brightness needs I was heading in the right direction for my own tastes.

Its more about the microphone and microphone placement while capturing the IR than what speaker or cabinet it's capturing. Learn the characteristics of different microphones.

I only bother with a single cab block .None of that doubling up for me.

Boogie tones are hard to dial in.

I couldn't/can't stop tweaking . Just stop tweaking and play or you'll get rusty!

I was aiming for perfection but what is perfection?

My room modes were causing utter havoc on my ears and now I know about them I can compensate. This has made the world of difference alone. I used REW to make an IR that tames the problems in my room. Now I can use boogie tones and find most of my tones were actually over bright!

I always use high and low cut in the cab block. 80hz and 7500hz-10000hz depending on what I want.

I'm currently think about building some custom rock wool bass traps and maybe a diffusion thing to hang on the wall. Those room modes matter.....a lot!
Click to expand...
I feel like I am in the same boat. What Cab Packs would be suggested. I have a pair of Yamaha H7 Studio Monitors.Thanks
 
catscanman82 said:
I feel like I am in the same boat. What Cab Packs would be suggested. I have a pair of Yamaha H7 Studio Monitors.Thanks
Click to expand...

Well it depends what your after. I didn't know anything about speakers or microphones or even cabinets when I got the Axe so I didn't even know what I liked.

Being a Metallica , Tremonti and bucket head kinda guy I figured a wanted a boogie cabinet of some kind so I bought cab pack 13 which is the Bulb pack. I respect peripherys production values and tones so it looked like a good fit.

Since then I also have a Marshall pack from own hammer and a small red wires pack.

I find the ownhammer IR to be good but very similar to each other within the pack. I also find that they are heavily coloured by the microphone and so they sound more "microphony" than most other IRs

ML Cab pack 13 to me just sounds much more high resolution and you could say "produced"
While I probably wouldn't use those IRs on a clean tone (for me that's where the stock cabs in the Axe shine) they are great for high gain and medium gain. They also have a good tonal variety to them throughout the pack.

As this is the only cab pack I have I can't say much about the other ones. I do intend to buy more but I just don't know which ones yet.

After all of this it turns out I like Vintage 30 speakers and sm57,r121,e906 best. Not so much the md421 microphone unless I high cut or have it low in a mixed IR.

Like I say it depends on what your going for.

It's one hell of a task just trying to figure out what you like and you would think that was the easy part right ?
 
HarrySound said:
It's one hell of a task just trying to figure out what you like and you would think that was the easy part right ?
Click to expand...

This is the gist of it.

Figuring out what speakers and mic techniques are appealing to you. Was a journey for me too even though I had recorded my amps many times.
 
I found working first with what I was used to hearing helped a lot. I like a classic distortion tone with some 80s overtones. I have been able to reproduce good shimmering cleans, tight crunch and fluid distortions by starting from scratch and first sampling various amps to see what I liked. I faithfully use the amp block's built in EQ and found if you don't kill everything under 100hz you can immediately experience mud translating into your blanket tone. I EQ the way a guitar is supposed to be EQ'd, killing the deep lows and shimmering highs that don't belong to a guitar. My problem is I hear someone else's preset and start tweaking all over again. One method that worked for me to get proper eq was to plug directly into my console, and using the graphic EQ, see what frequencies the guitar actually uses naturally. Using hat method, I was actually able to get quite full tones without the other frequencies muddying or shrilling the sound.
 
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