From box to stage

E

exleper

Inspired
I'm still on the waiting list for the Axe-FXII so I have time to do a lot of reading. This seem like a the ultimate nerd amp. The good thing is, it looks like you can adjust soo many things to shape your tone. Very versatile. The bad thing is, I feel like it will take me many weeks of reading and button pressing before I feel confident enough to play a gig with it. I'm used to tube amps where you could play a gig the night you get the amp and sound good.

So my question is, how long did it take you before you started playing shows with your AFX?
 
Two weeks ... Then I took BOTH rigs to a gig so I could switch back and forth for comfort... By the forth set, my tube amp was off and it never came out to another gig.

Walking out to the audience when playing will change your life. What we hear on stage with a tube amp rarely sounds as good out front. Total opposite with axefx.

As long as you have a great monitoring system, and are comfortable with hearing how your guitar sound is represented as a mic'd signal, you'll transition just fine.
 
I'm only a wanna-be-nerd and barely know a fraction of what others know about electronics and the Axe. I play in a cover band that plays a very broad range of music. I was up and running with 40+ presets that sounded great in about 2 weeks. The thing about the Axe is you can go VERY, VERY deep and tweak a patch until it is exactly where you want it, but you can get it to the 95% stage pretty quickly. The path I took was to research the guitar rigs for all of the guitarists who played on the songs we play and simply emulated them on the Axe. Then I tweaked them to my liking. I have since refined those presets a lot and I've gone to FRFR. Every time I look at a patch that one of the pros here create, I learn something and think through how I can apply that concept to my patches. I find myself becoming more nerdy as time goes on.

So, the answer to your question is, it depends on what you plan to do with the axe. My recommendation is to start small, look at all the videos from the folks on this forum, and get a couple of basic patches together that you like. Then start building your library.

Jump on in, the water's fine!
 
You could do a gig the same day you receive the unit if you really wanted to. I began by simply running stock presets. I still use several stock or slight tweaked stock presets. As Gamedojo pointed out, FOH sound is way more consistent and better sounding than most people ever had prior to the Axe.
 
I'll be the dissenting opinion here..it took me a couple months to feel really comfortable with the Axe. Part of the issue definitely stemmed from option paralysis. I'd like my sound, switch to another, play it awhile, go back to the first one and hate it...tweak it, compare it to sound 2 and then hate sound two. It could be pretty frustrating. I also probably spent too much time chasing sounds that I'd hear in the forum or on youtube or whatever. Several times I came really close to selling it and just going back to an amp and processor.

Eventually I sorted my sound, dialed in the handful of sounds I need for the band, some additional recording sounds and my weirdo/noise fx. I'm very happy with it now and definitely prefer it to my amp. Love the recorded sounds I'm getting and through our rehearsal pa. Still not sure on my live sound. I like my Mackie FRFR, but I kind of want to go back to live cabs...
 
Box to STage... about 2 months

Hey,

I would say it took me about 2 months from getting the system to first gig. And I ended up going from 20+ presets, down to 5 with 5 alternate lead settings. This covers all my original gigs, as well as the cover shows.

Where I have problems is that I can spend an entire day just tweaking a single preset, trying amps, cabs, compression on/off, various filters, etc... So at some point I had to just call it quits, get a solid set of sounds (Acoustic, PRS-Bright, PRS-Clean, PRS-Dirty, PRS-Modern), and I am set. :)

That was more than a year ago, and I have never had a problem other than once. I hit a preset that I didn't define the lead with, and suddenly everything dropped out (I have all the non-used presets set to "silent"), and it took me a couple seconds to realize what happened. Nothing like no sound to get your heart pumping...

Steve



somata said:
I'll be the dissenting opinion here..it took me a couple months to feel really comfortable with the Axe. Part of the issue definitely stemmed from option paralysis. I'd like my sound, switch to another, play it awhile, go back to the first one and hate it...tweak it, compare it to sound 2 and then hate sound two. It could be pretty frustrating. I also probably spent too much time chasing sounds that I'd hear in the forum or on youtube or whatever. Several times I came really close to selling it and just going back to an amp and processor.

Eventually I sorted my sound, dialed in the handful of sounds I need for the band, some additional recording sounds and my weirdo/noise fx. I'm very happy with it now and definitely prefer it to my amp. Love the recorded sounds I'm getting and through our rehearsal pa. Still not sure on my live sound. I like my Mackie FRFR, but I kind of want to go back to live cabs...
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