Dialing Tone while 'Live' Re-Amping: Not same signal?

Miscreant

Miscreant

Inspired
Hey guys, I like to dial in my tones by setting the Axe to take a USB Input, to which I send a dry track from my DAW. I can then tweak without having to constantly stop to play the instrument to check the sounds/changes.

Usually this works fine, but last night I noticed that the tone of my re-amped dry track is much thinner--more anemic--than the actual tone of both the wet track and of the instrument itself when played live (e.g. after changing the input from USB to analog 1 or whatever).

Any idea of what's going on here? The basic problem is that my re-amped dry signal is not identical to the wet track, even though it should be. Something in the signal chain is causing the attenuation in the tone/signal....

Thanks a lot.
 
Confirm that the effect is real by testing with looper block: place that as the 1st block at 100% mix and compare that to your USB return. This way the acoustic tone of your guitar doesn't fool your hearing when you compare the live input to the USB input.

When you send the dry signal from the DAW, is the master chain empty or bypassed? Are the input setting in the Axe "left only"?
 
aziz said:
Confirm that the effect is real by testing with looper block: place that as the 1st block at 100% mix and compare that to your USB return. This way the acoustic tone of your guitar doesn't fool your hearing when you compare the live input to the USB input.

When you send the dry signal from the DAW, is the master chain empty or bypassed? Are the input setting in the Axe "left only"?
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Thanks for chiming in. The input setting on the Axe are left only, yep., As for the dry signal out of the DAW, I'm not sure what you mean by 'master chain'. But one thing I thought is that I'm using Reaper creates folders of tracks by basically creating subtracks, where the parent track is the folder containing the subtrack. I just realized that sinc emy dry tracks are in folders, when I'm sending the dry signal back to the Axe, it's being fed through the parent track, and hence that might be the problem.

But I just made the dry track a parent track itself, so it's only going through the master, and I'm still getting an attenuated tone/signal. It's odd.
 
I think I figured it out: when the volume on my try track is set to less than 0db, it actually attenuates the very tone of the re-amp. Presumably this is because my DAW is feeding less signal to the Axe...but I'm not sure. I never realized this before.

Anyone else noticed this?
 
"..when the volume on my dry track is set to less than 0db, it actually attenuates the very tone of the re-amp."
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you. But it SOUNDS like you're puzzled that the tone of an amp would change, and be thinner, when you turn down the gain.
That isn't puzzling, of course. It's like expecting the tone to be the same, when you roll down the volume pot on your guitar.
 
paulasbell said:
"..when the volume on my dry track is set to less than 0db, it actually attenuates the very tone of the re-amp."
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you. But it SOUNDS like you're puzzled that the tone of an amp would change, and be thinner, when you turn down the gain.
That isn't puzzling, of course. It's like expecting the tone to be the same, when you roll down the volume pot on your guitar.
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Yeah, I was puzzled, because I didn't realize that the gain on the dry track functioned that way. I didn't realize it was gain, and rather thought it was something more like just level: where the gain stays the same but the sheer volume is changing.
 
Miscreant said:
Yeah, I was puzzled, because I didn't realize that the gain on the dry track functioned that way. I didn't realize it was gain, and rather thought it was something more like just level: where the gain stays the same but the sheer volume is changing.
Click to expand...
Level and gain are the same thing.

Don't confuse gain with distortion... Sometimes the terminology we guitarists use can be confusing. We often say gain when we really mean distortion.
 
I now think I get it. But I was thinking that the level in my tracks was like volume on a stereo: it just impacts volume, like the literal output from the speaker. I think that was a sensible assumption, not least because that's precisely how track levels work when I'm not feeding back into the Axe via USB--e.g., if I turn up track 1 I don't get more distortion, but just the same amount of distortion louder in the mix.
 
Miscreant said:
I now think I get it. But I was thinking that the level in my tracks was like volume on a stereo: it just impacts volume, like the literal output from the speaker. I think that was a sensible assumption, not least because that's precisely how track levels work when I'm not feeding back into the Axe via USB--e.g., if I turn up track 1 I don't get more distortion, but just the same amount of distortion louder in the mix.
Click to expand...
In this case, the Axe is exactly like the speaker since the track volume is the source of the input to the Axe. If the track level didn’t do that, it’d be a very useless control.
 
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