Do you all pretty much leave stock settings on amp for live?

My Gotos that almost always get touched that seem to have a big impact on my ears or how the pick attack feels to me...

Supply Sag
Xformer Match
Xformer Drive
Negative Feedback
Compression
I/O EQ
 
Cooper, do you mean this for recording AND live? What I was getting at with this whole thread was trying to see what I need to do. Basically we have all tweaked at gig volume and then taken to rehearsal and it does not cut or sound right. Sometimes I think I mess with things too much. I typically mess with B/M/T, Presence, Gain, Vol, Level, Sat, and Neg Feedback. I don't do any cuts(leave the high/low cuts for the Cab block. I don't think these are too crazy of things to adjust though.
Tweaking at gig volume is a good first step, but if you're playing alone while tweaking, you still aren't necessary putting yourself in the best position for good live tone. In fact, what sounds best to a player's ears when playing solo may actually be a frankly pretty poor tone to use live. And vice versa. Not all the time. But maybe.
Set aside a rehearsal just for dialing in tones that last 10%. Tweak while you play. Full band.

What cuts live is mids/upper mids. That's where the guitar really "lives" in a mix, whether on a record or coming through a PA. Try pushing up the gain two or three dB on the amp default input eq 1k peaking curve. Or try a PEQ after the amp with a nice soft bumb somewhere between 1000 and 2500. And definitely go for those high/low cuts in the cab block. You're not necessarily going to enjoy the tone as much solo, but you'll cut through the mix way better when you get with your band.
 
My approach for tweaking at home is to record the guitar at the DAW with full backing tracks. Then reamp the clean signal and get a tone that sits well on the mix (tweaking the Axe-FX while playing the full mix).

The result usually translates very well when playing live, direct to PA.

Your own sound at the stage will depend on your monitors but, no matter how crappy they are, the audience will get the right and balanced tone
 
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My approach for tweaking at home is to record the guitar at the DAW with full backing tracks. Then reamp the clean signal and get a tone that sits well on the mix (tweaking the Axe-FX while playing the full mix).

The result usually translates very well when playing live, direct to PA.

Your own sound at the stage will depend on your monitors but, no matter how crappy they are, the audience will get the right and balanced tone
THIS. I find that if you can cut through a backing track for the most part the balance will be pretty good. BUT... I'm not discarding what was said above by more experienced and actually gigging musicians say... I'm just saying that works great for me in my dungeon :)
 
My approach for tweaking at home is to record the guitar at the DAW with full backing tracks. Then reamp the clean signal and get a tone that sits well on the mix (tweaking the Axe-FX while playing the full mix).

The result usually translates very well when playing live, direct to PA.

Your own sound at the stage will depend on your monitors but, no matter how crappy they are, the audience will get the right and balanced tone

Yes, this is a great method.
Even better...record a board mix of your next show and mute the guitars. Then tweak your tone with everything cranked up over PA speakers in your rehearsal space.
 
I use compression pretty regularly though that's about it, I rarely touch anything else. For one thing, the amps sound so good as is. Second, it means a lot less work when I update ;-)
 
I rarely go past the basic pages except I will sometimes go into the Graphic EQ to bump up a little low end to give the amp some oomph if I feel it needs it.

Other than that, the basic page and proper IR selection gets me pretty much everything I need.
 
Same basic approach and tones whether live or recording, appropriate volume and in context of a full mix and all that, only thing I’ve ever consistently done differently live is running the cab block low pass more aggressively (5-6khz rather than 8khz).

The majority of the time I don’t mess with advanced parameters at all, just basic B/M/T/gain, and a good portion of the time even those controls stay at default.
 
I can't imagine not being able to get it to cut live, I've never had any issues like that. and no, I don't tweak any advanced parameters other than adding output compression to clean to low gain stuff.
 
A lot of the speaker related parameters are borderline necessary depending on your rig. That is part of the power of FAS’s modeling, other platforms don’t even expose that and it is directly related to the authenticity of your results as an emulation. So, I guess that is one area I think deep dive is worth the effort.

The other is emulating modded Amps or unmodeled amp features you may be interested in... there are a lot of ‘deep’ or at least non-BMT parameters that give you access to other functions of the amp or common mods.

Even if you are not expert in what the deep parameters do, it can be valuable to learn about these. Posts from Cliff, yek’s amp guide, and the wiki are all key resources here.

Someone will often ask for something to be modeled and Cliff will say “just take Amp X and set these parameters to these values and it is the same thing.”

It can be overwhelming to try to memorize all that so I often make an Axe-Edit block for that.
 
I always liked to tweak various settings in the amp block to get each preset just-so. However, when the glut of firmware updates on the II required an amp block reset, I had to re-think, and opted to leave many of the settings at their default settings, so I didn't have to go back in and re-adjust them after each update. This seems counter-productive, in that the unit was capable of so much, yet I was compelled to leave it alone. Whethere that will remain my MO with the III remains to be seen.
 
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