Clipping - still a little confused!

Goldie1981

New Member
Good afternoon all,
I’m just about to purchase a mk1 fx8, however I’m a little confused about the input clipping issue which can occur.
I understand this is basically when the received signal into the unit is too ‘hot’ however how hot do the pickups need to be to cause the issue. I have a PRS se Holcomb, an ESP dv8 (Duncan jb in the bridge) and les paul hp (2018) and wonder if these will cause the problem?
Is solving this just a case of increasing the input ‘pad’? I believe this increases the noise floor (basically more background hiss?). As a home only player (into a Friedman runt 20 head) I’m fine with a little noise - I spent time with cheap zoom effects units into cheapo amps so I’m assuming that at its worst the fx8 will be hugely better than that!
Do the outputs from the drive effects work the same way as traditional pedals do - by this I’m wanting to ensure that boosts for example will have the same effect of driving the amp harder when engaged? Or is simply the output sound is digitally ‘altered’ to replicate the type of boost sound rather than increasing the signal strength.

Apologies in advance if this sounds like I’m missing the obvious or showing a complete lack of understanding - both are very distinct possibilities!
 
If your pickups are too hot then you can adjust the input signal pad to fix that problem. Whether or not that will be something you have to do is dependent on many variables including string gauge, how hard you pick, how close your pickups are to the strings, and probably some other things that I'm not thinking of. Regardless, don't worry about that. The design of the FX8 took this issue into account.

The drives and boosts do actually function like their real world counterparts. They will increase the output signal strength and therefore drive the input stage of your amp if placed in the pre section of the signal chain. They do not create a modeled "boosted" tone effect like you asked about.
 
I have this problem with my Fx-II, where power chords with my PRS (and other axes) are often lighting up the red input clip light. Is this a problem? How do I fix it?
 
According to the user manual, the red LED's start lighting up at -6dB below the clipping level. The ideal situation is when you just barely light hit these levels when playing with the most output you will have. If the red LED's are only lighting up momentarily when you play power chords then you probably have the input gain set correctly.

If you want to adjust the input gain, navigate to the I/O menu and you can make the adjustment on the input tab. See page 15 of the Ax-FxII user manual.
 
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