Dialing in a tone (again and again...)

Boris

Boris

Member
Hi everyone,

I am having this strange and very frustrating sensation .....
for example, I am dialing in a tone (let's say Metallica, seems pretty popular around here these days ;-) ) for hours, finally I am happy and save the result.
Next day the preset sounds way to bass heavy. So, I am tweaking it again. Sounds great, saving!
Next day it sounds kind of thin...
You see where I am going with this

Is this normal? What can I do differently to archive a steady pleasing tone?

By the way: Gear stays the same, Headphones and volume is the same...

Thanks for any advise

Cheers Boris
 
Make a copy instead of saving only the latest. Then compare how they sound over days or weeks.

If consistently one sounds too bassy and the other too thin then split the difference and call it a day.

If you like one one day and the other the next it's probably ear fatigue or psychoacoustical - perhaps weird or frustrating but not abnormal.
 
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In these situations, it is very helpful to use references - If you're going for a Metallica tone, have your favorite Metallica song ready to go at all times. The main purpose is not to copy that tone exactly, but to use as a reference, so you can pull yourself back, when your ears get tired, and you start going off in one or the other direction
 
I’d echo what the people above have said, ear fatigue is a real thing and it’s a bitch to deal with when you’re trying to do something for a long time. Make sure to take regular breaks when dialling sounds in for an extended time, and as mentioned above, I find it extremely helpful to save multiple versions of whatever sound I’m messing with (IIC+ High Gain Day 1, IIC+ High Gain Day 2, etc) to track what I’m doing each time. If one is too much one way and the other is too much the other way, then yeah it’s probably best to split the difference and come back to it after a little time away.

Getting the perfect guitar sound is a massive pain. If you ever get there, let me know how you did it 😂
 
Definitely make sure youre using a reference, snip a bit of audio thats guitar only if you can. I can almost guarantee you that if you're shooting for a tone in your head the wiggle room of difference is going to be miles wide. If you have the reference there the wiggle room for error will be way way way smaller.

In a similar vibe I'll put on an album I havent heard in ages and expect to hear this massive mix and its just a lot tamer than I remember. It's just how things go when its a bit up in the air. When you have a concrete grounding for a certain sound then youve always got a hard copy guide kind of thing.
 
Boris said:
I am dialing in a tone (let's say Metallica, seems pretty popular around here these days ;-) ) for hours, finally I am happy and save the result.
Next day the preset sounds way to bass heavy.
Click to expand...
Cam Heiliger said:
Ear fatigue is a real thing. I'm sure many around here have experienced this phenomenon. Make sure that you are listening to your presets at the same volume as the Fletcher-Munson effect can affect the way you hear a preset depending on how loud it is in the room.
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Ear fatigue, agreed.

Actually, it's our brain that gets tired of hearing the same thing and starts to adjust to remove the excessive sounds, whether they're too much highs or lows. It's part of its protective mechanism.

Listen to something else for the same amount of time, or just walk away and listen to nothing. The issue is that, if you listen to the same over-emphasis of frequencies, the brain will adjust and eventually your brain will insist that everything has to sound that same way, and then you'll have to retrain it. We have so many people complaining about the sound of their gear and often it really seems like their brains have adjusted to an extreme one way or another.
 
I've looked into every menu on my FXIII and cannot for the life of me find the "setting" that makes me and the other significate person living in this house agree on what I sound like. No matter what Preset I choose we always disagree on Output 1 setting! If you work on nailing something all day and the comment is "RA is kicking the crap out of your fingers today..."
Thank God for the jack right above "Instr" on the front panel....
 
Boris said:
Hi everyone,

I am having this strange and very frustrating sensation .....
for example, I am dialing in a tone (let's say Metallica, seems pretty popular around here these days ;-) ) for hours, finally I am happy and save the result.
Next day the preset sounds way to bass heavy. So, I am tweaking it again. Sounds great, saving!
Next day it sounds kind of thin...
You see where I am going with this

Is this normal? What can I do differently to archive a steady pleasing tone?

By the way: Gear stays the same, Headphones and volume is the same...

Thanks for any advise

Cheers Boris
Click to expand...
Our ears are also different from day to day. I have days where I am more sensitive to high mids than others. I will dial a tone that sounds amazing, and the next day (specially when it's the beginning of the day and my ears are just "waking up") it will sound super harsh and aggressive in the high mids. The only thing to know is being aware of this is 80% of the victory. You'll just have to recognize WHEN it's happening and just tweak accordingly. Also, if you have a reference tone, or if you're playing along to a song to hear the tone in the mix, it really helps.
 
Will Schut said:
And, just sometimes, our ears play tricks on us. Just put one hand in warm water and the other in cold water. After a minute put both hands in a bucket of lukewarm water. Your one hand will tell you it's cold, the other one will say it's warm.
Same with our ears. A sound you hear will be referenced against the sound you heard just before that.
Play with your favorite sound. Then add a EQ block with way, way to much bass. Play for a couple of minutes and than take away the EQ (so you are right back where you started). Now your favorite sound will sound light an thin to you. So, some visual reference might come in handy sometimes.
Click to expand...
 
I use to try recalibrating my ears every now and then. Using a references I've found over time that i like. It's easy to spend a lot of time tweaking and getting real into the details, but then i often get too hung up on certain aspects of the sound.

Our brains are really good at filtering out things. When we get accustomed to sound over time, the brain filter out the bad things so that we can hear what we "want"

So my best advice is to take breaks and use references.

And just to clarify, I don't mean you need to spend time tweaking the sound to get 100% perfect to the reference. The main idea is balance in frequency response. And fit it to the context you will be using the sound in.

I am by no means an expert, but I am well above averagely interested in getting what I want from my guitar rig.
 
All great advice here. Saving a new revised version is always my goto then a few days later I'll go between the few variations. More often than not, I find myself going back to the first version I made. A lot of times I don't even change anything preset to preset except the IR, so I sometimes just have different Its on the different cab channels loaded to swap between.
 
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