Clean Jazz Guitar Sound on Ultra, please help!

Jerry K. said:
I also had a lot of problems getting the jazz tone I was looking for. Ultimately I got pretty close with the Benson patch but I backed off the compressor quite a bit and messed with the EQ. I use a 335 with it and after many hours I got pretty darn close to what I wanted to hear. I have a Godin LGXST and it doesn't sound nearly as good through the same patch so the guitar really matters with this type of sound. I think the jazz and fenderish clean sounds are the weakest part of the ultra. I am really hoping this is improved in the Axe II. I will say that once you add even the slightest bit of drive to the jazz clean sounds they start to come alive but this is not always appropriate.
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The cleans in the II have improved a ton. I'll try and post some clips of my new jazz clean tone here soon, but ya, loads better than the Ultra. I'm actually using the Shiva Clean amp mostly, I think it sounds more like a Fender than the Fender sims.


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i find Benson patch to sound very jazzy using a strat, but it doesn't go very well with my jazz guitar.

For my current jazz patch i use Twin Reverb model, and i like the result. When i first tried to make a jazzy patch with my ultra a year ago i was too inspired by rosenwinkel and i tryed to copy his tone by messing with eq alot. I Now just try to make the guitar sound as natural as possible, without thinking about sounding like this or that, and it works better.
You can get closer to the sound of anyone else if you copy the articulation and phrasing, than the actual tone.
 
Yeah, sorry, I guess I went off a bit about all the other stuff when this thread is about the Axe-Fx sounds and not other ways of making a good jazz tone .... ;)

What I'm finding now is that the Benson sound is good for my real jazz box. It sounds close to my Acoustic Image amps, which are designed to not color the sound. I think boosting some of the mids, low mids, while turning down the lows (due to my bass heavy Raezer's Edge cab ), and bringing up some of the presence may be doing the trick... I haven't played with the compression, but that will be tonight. I like a really dry, fat, punchy jazz tone, but not too bass-heavy and not brittle either....

Any other good Axe virtual amp / Cab choices not yet mentioned?
 
I'm not having too much trouble dialing in a jazz tone with the fender sims on the ultra, it took me some time to figure it out but now I feel that I can get what I want.

The Jay Mitchell IR's are my favourite cabs, especially the Celestion Gold 2x12 and the 2x12 Eminence cabs.

Of course there's also a lot of taste in what kind of jazz tone you want. I am personally not a big Acoustic Image fan, and I HATE the Roland Jazz Chorus sound and feel
so much that I never use that sim. I was thinking of making a request to have it removed ;) To me the search for a good sound is a part of the process of developing
as a guitarist and it is a never ending experiment.

The Shiva and Mesa cleans are pretty good too but I lean more towards the fenders, dumble and vox stuff.

Jens
 
sivadyert said:
What I'm finding now is that the Benson sound is good for my real jazz box. It sounds close to my Acoustic Image amps, which are designed to not color the sound.
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I have an Acoustic Image Coda, and I find it to be a "sweetened" version of FRFR. When I tried to match the AI to my studio monitors, using the AxeFX Output 2 equalization, I had to dial in the following compensation. . . .

63Hz +6.6 db
125Hz +5.2 db
250Hz +1.4 db
500Hz -4.5 db
2kHz -2.1 db
4KHz +3.8db

This was done by ear, but it will give you a sense as to what the frequency response is of the AI is. Simply flip the "+" and "-" symbols.

sivadyert said:
I think boosting some of the mids, low mids, while turning down the lows (due to my bass heavy Raezer's Edge cab ), and bringing up some of the presence may be doing the trick... I haven't played with the compression, but that will be tonight. I like a really dry, fat, punchy jazz tone, but not too bass-heavy and not brittle either....
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This maps really well to the settings above. If you set up a GEQ with the inverse of this (e.g. 63Hz -6.6 db, 125Hz -5.2db, 250Hz -1.4db, 500Hz +4.5db, 2KHz +2.1db, 4KHz -3.8db) you would probably be really close to your AI tone.

Terry.
 
Jens said:
The Jay Mitchell IR's are my favourite cabs, especially the Celestion Gold 2x12 and the 2x12 Eminence cabs.
Jens
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I prefer them as well. The far field IRs have a depth and dimensionality that feels/sounds very "real" to me. I get very satisfying live performance results with the far fields. I mostly lean on the G12-65 and work with the amps that play nice with that one.

When I experiment with the near field (close mic'd) IRs I always end up trying to mix two or three of them to get things to open up and breathe. With the near field IRs I always end up mixing in some amount of a parallel 2x12 gold.

In my limited understanding this dimensional phenomena makes since. A far field IR captures the experience of standing some given distance from a cabinet and hearing it blossom into the room. A near field IR is roughly the experience of placing ones ear against a speaker grill and listening from there.

Close mic'ing evolved solely to deal with issues of live performance and the attempt to isolate different signals for live mixing. All the various applications of on-axis, off-axis, etc. grew out of a fundamentally flawed practice that does not capture what we hear/feel when we play through a real cabinet.

Most of the Axe IRs are near field. I wonder if this a large part of why many Axe users have trouble getting the "amp in the room" experience.
 
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CodePoet said:
Which IRs are the Jay Mitchell ones?
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AxeFx II Manual page 57:
"Those marked (JM) were created by Jay Mitchell"

1x12 EMI Open Back
2x12 Gold Far-Field
2x12 G12-65 Far-Field

All three were brought over from the Ultra/Standard.
 
Like Scott I prefer those IR's because I don't get the feeling that I am playing through a mic'ed guitar in a PA but through an amp.
I never had much luck with the G12-65 IR though but that might be because of the sounds I like ? To me it does not go too well
with fenderish sounds.

Jens
 
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