Brootalz questions

DrNick

DrNick

Inspired
Two quick questions:

  1. What was the tonal impact of the change made to the FAS Brootalz amp in 17.02?
  2. I love the character of this amp, but I find it almost unusably loud, even at moderate gain (especially with the bright switch on). The background noise between notes, and even during some notes, is distracting. Is there any way to help clean this up? Of course, the input gate takes care of things nicely when not playing, but man it's loud while playing.
 
With an amp that's as high gain as this one, noise is just going to be a natural factor. Your best bet is to meticulously tweak the noise gate and the preamp gain until you get things to an optimal level.

It will also help if you don't point your guitar's pickups towards EMF emitting devices like lights, computer monitors, etc.
 
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DrNick said:
Two quick questions:

  1. What was the tonal impact of the change made to the FAS Brootalz amp in 17.02?
  2. I love the character of this amp, but I find it almost unusably loud, even at moderate gain (especially with the bright switch on). The background noise between notes, and even during some notes, is distracting. Is there any way to help clean this up? Of course, the input gate takes care of things nicely when not playing, but man it's loud while playing.
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Definitely test that it isn't a grounding issue or EMF crap from a computer or something. Walk around your space with the guitar plugged in and all the gate off and see if your getting more noise in certain places. I have this problem in my studio space because of my computer tower. The monitor itself doesn't do anything, but point the pickup at the tower and its noise city. Also, if you have pedal in front or in the fx loop of the AFX you may want to check the power supplies. The OneSpots I was using were adding SO MUCH noise to my signal.
 
I always found this amp model to sound better with boost on, and gain lower. Maybe see if that works to get the same gain with less noise.
 
I tried that, and it doesn't seem to do much for the noise. I already have the gain pretty low with Input Drive (as well as MV) set at 3.0. Turning off the bright switch takes tons of the noise out, but this really takes a lot of the character I like out of the amp. I tried dialing the Bright Cap back as well - this helps but there a constant trade-off between character and noise...

I may just have to settle for a compromise between these two. But I thought I'd toss the issue out here to see if anyone had some tricks up their sleeves. Thanks all!
 
mnemonic said:
Can you post a recording? I've never had a noise problem with any amp in the axe fx, including the brootalz.
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Ok, I've never tried this before, so I hope this works. Around 10 seconds in I just hit some palm muted notes and hold them for a moment, at which point the background noise becomes quite apparent. This noise is present in all high-gain amps, but is just much louder in the brootalz than the rest. For what it's worth, the patch is very basic - amp at defaults except Input Drive and MV dialed back to 4, bright switch on (see previous post of comments on this), then a low pass at 5k, followed by a cab.

 
That sounds like the normal EMF noise just from florescent lights, maybe a dodgy ground in the guitar, etc. I have one guitar that, unless the volume is 100% of the way up, I get a grounding issue with a noise similar volume to that one, so it may be in your signal chain. I need to replace the pot, I think. at 100% of the way up, I get much less noise though.

Do you get significantly less noise on other high gain amp models?

Its late here so I can't fire up my axe fx, but I'll set a reminder in my phone to try out Brootalz again when I get home from work tomorrow. If you post the patch, I can do a recording with it, and at least we will be able to narrow down if its the patch/amp, or if its something else in your signal chain.
 
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