FM3 - Baritone tunings and hefty strings?

R

Riffmagus

New Member
Afternoon All,

I'm rather interested in the FM3 due to the deep parameters, and ability to pair with my current valve head (Laney Ironheart 120w head) into my Suhr Reactive Load.

But, I'm wondering how it will handle 14-68 strings on my Rivolta Baritone? I love and am used to the feel and warmth / expansive tone that these give on clean sounds - but with gain, things seem rather 'wooly' and mushy.

I play mostly, drone / doom / ambient jams with the guitar - and was very taken with Leon Todd's Doom Metal 9 minute tone video (can't post links currently) as this came across as open / natural (before the fuzz was introduced) and offered the 'wall of sound' that I have in my head.

I currently use the HX Stomp for IR's - and although the cab / speaker choice makes up a good 60% of the tone - feel that the preamp options are what I need to get a decent sound working here - so anyone care to school me if this would be a viable option?

Cheers,

-Riffmagus
 
Well, I don't have any (current) experience with low-tunings into it, but Leon often plays in drop-C on his PRS and I've seen plenty of postings of things from 7 strings and the like that sounded as good as you'd expect. So I don't imagine it would be an issue at all.

Hopefully someone with a baritone or low tuned 7 can chime in, but I can't think of any particular reason it wouldn't sound as awesome as anything else.
 
I play mostly doomy music with no issues with an SG in B standard / drop A into the FM3. I never got to try an HX Stomp at home (just a little at GC pre-covid) but did do a trial of Helix native which I couldn't get anywhere near as realistic as the FM3. My most commonly used tones are based on copying rig rundowns then tweaking a little and using channels to add a little cut or boost here to remove the wooly/mushy crap.

One thing that you may run into with ambient music is limitation from only having 1 reverb. With a little time spent on CPU saving methods or alternative ways to use pedals (LT videos are great here) you can easily overcome them though.
 
You won't have any problems with low tunings on the Fractal stuff. My daily player is a 7-string in drop G# with a 64 for the lowest string however I also use baritone 7's and multiscale 8's without issue.
 
I play some Mark Lettieri-type baritone stuff with my Danelectro Baritone with it all the time. No issues. I did set up a preset for it to manage the gain differently than my strat, but I actually don't have to change any global stuff for the switch.
 
~80% of my playing is done in drop G or lower on 7/8 strings with relatively heavy strings. I also play bass, tuned as low as drop G as well through it. And it sounds great! I haven't noticed any artifacting or anything of that sort of the sound regardless of how low you are going. The bass tones I use are generally very clear/clean and there is no distortion or mush. The heavily downtuned guitar tones are powerful and thick. Definitely not mushy. Being able to deep dive the parameters makes that easier, IMO.

As @Iam8atman said, I could see you running into issues for ambient effects for doom stuff as you run out of CPU. There are tricks to this from what I understand, but it hasn't been an issue for me. (My presets are generally very simple compared to others though) This could also be helped with external effects, if you have them already, to free up some CPU.

For stuff I do that isn't that downtuned, I make whole different presets. And it sounds great for that as well.
 
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