Getting that warmth sound.....

dsouza

dsouza

Experienced
I find with my AX8 and what is probably true with most of the FAS line is that the presets sound very nice but kinda digital. It's like there's no warmth coming out of them unlike for example a tube amp pushing air.

How do you get that warmth sound, like that kinda intimate feel you get when you run a tube amp cooking in a coffee house with the crowd gathering?

It seems I love the effects and amp simulations of my AX8 but I'm not getting psyched enough because it sounds all too digital and computer like.

Do any of you still keep tube amps around for this reason in addition to your FAS systems?
 
Neither here
No No No GIF
 
The thing I always do is turn down the HF is the Cab Block from the default 20K a bunch. I got that from a very respected guitarist and Fractal user whose name I forget because I'm old and senile.
 
I have all sorts of tube gear: 3 tube poweramps, 4 tube preamps, all wired to my axe... a couple of tube amps outside my rack setup... but not because I don't get the warmth I want out of the axe fx... i'm just a gear/variety whore. I think w the axe (if you try) one can def get a super clean sound that is "not warm"... the ss sound... using a jc120 or a direct signal blended or any number of ways. I also think that sometimes adding a compressor w/o manipulating the sidechain controls or adding lots of fx to a patch can take me a bit farther away from the "straight in" warmth but one can dial that back in by (again) manipulating sidechain controls. That said, just running into a twin/cab and out... is about as warm as I've ever managed to capture from an actual amp/mic/interface. I guess ymmv.
 
Put a tube compressor at the end of your signal chain. As with all compression a little goes a long way. The tube comp will warm things up a bit and you can go even warmer with some eq tweaks in the tube comp's sidechain. I get warmer still by adding a smidge of tape/tube saturation in the cab block's preamp section (set preamp type to tape or tube then dial in a little drive and saturation). Also in cab's preamp I use a high cut at around 8800 Hz.

Another trick I use sometimes is to blend in a 2nd cab using a matching rear IR. A lot of warmth comes from the rear reflections of a guitar cab.

You can tweak all the aforementioned until you hit a warm and toasty sweet spot for you ears.
 
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All good advice. I wasn't saying the AX8 isn't better than a tube (on the contrary it can do so much more) however, a cranked tube amp pushing air with tubes cooking seems to have a toasty sound about it.

I realize I could get close to this on my current gear by raising the volume of my REDSOUND Elis 8 speakers. It almost always sounds warmer when the volume goes up.

Forget my cheap mackie monitors ... Man those 4" make the AX8 sound shrill. Thank goodness for my Elis 8's.

However, I still think for small gigs I wouldn't want to transport my AX8 and Elis 8's. That's an additional $4500 CAD I'm bringing with me. For a small gig I'm considering adding a Vox AC10 to my current gear again. During boxing day it will only cost $700 CAD or so and I can cart it with my guitars and leave the AX8 and Elis 8's at home in the studio where they belong (or on a big stage where the payday is much higher).

Why not have the best of both worlds? All options have pros and cons. :)
 
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dsouza said:
Why not have the best of both worlds? All options have pros and cons.
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I love my Fractals, but they don’t fill every niche, especially if you’re at a jam or playing someplace where you are seriously pressed for the time to get connected and running.

I have my favorite 1x12” combo and its smaller sibling with a 10” which work best for the times I have to be up and ready to play in a minute. And there are the times when I’m supplying backline to people who are freaked out by blinking lights and a unit that doesn’t look like an amp and cabinet….
 
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Greg Ferguson said:
I love my Fractals, but they don’t fill every niche, especially if you’re at a jam or playing someplace where you are seriously pressed for the time.

I have my favorite 1x12” combo and its smaller sibling with a 10” which work best for the times I have to be up and ready to play in a minute.
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Just curious what 1x12 and 1x10 are these?
 
marsonic said:
Nope.

A lot of us may be able to help....but, what do you mean by "warmth" and "digital"? If you can't be precise with those definitions, we'd be shooting in the dark.
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When anyone uses "warmth" vs "digital" they almost always mean analog vs digital. The old trope that analog sounds warmer than digital - so there are the usual ways we do that with digital signal processing to emulate analog gear/recordings.

I know you know this stuff as well or better than me. But I assume that is where the OP is coming from.
 
Rex Rox said:
When anyone uses "warmth" vs "digital" they almost always mean analog vs digital.
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Right...but people mean different things when they say them.

A "digital" sound could (very commonly) mean aliasing, artifacts of data compression, uncontrolled IMD, truncation distortion, missing "pleasing" noise, or...I don't even know what else. Digital doesn't actually have a sound...just a lot of things that people can do wrong if they don't know all the pieces involved. Fractals don't really suffer from any of these, at least not worse than the "real" gear. Some of the amps exhibit things like IMD and crossover distortion...but so do the real amps they're based on. I haven't heard fractals have a problem with aliasing, and I'm under the impression that they're aggressively oversampling where they need to. Everything that distorts can cause intermodulation distortion. All the devices are 24-bit IO, so I'd be surprised if anyone actually heard truncation distortion outside of listening tests (and it might be dithering anyway). And a lot of the blocks cause realistic noise. So...I really don't know where that complaint comes from without more details.

"Warmth", to me, means some kind of shift away from treble and toward low mids or bass. Which is easy.

The one that really gets on my nerves is the idea of "tube warmth". You hear that in terms of amplifiers that are distorting (whether hi-fi amps run too hot or intentionally distorting a guitar amp) because....that distortion always adds more high end and makes the sound brighter (overtones are necessarily higher pitched than the sounds that cause them). It's just that tube amps are inherently not hi-fi devices and roll off the top octave or so of response on the way out. But...fractals already do this where they're supposed to.

Rex Rox said:
The old trope that analog sounds warmer than digital - so there are the usual ways we do that with digital signal processing to emulate analog gear/recordings.
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The terms "warm" and "digital" are so incredibly vague as to be useless. It really seems like everyone uses "warmth" wrong and almost no one can describe what digital even sounds like. Unless some DSP designer is doing something wrong, digital audio doesn't have a sound.

In the end, "warm" just means "good" and "digital" just means "bad"....which means the question is "What I hear is bad, how do I make it sound good?"....which is essentially meaningless without details.

To OP, I really don't mean for that to come off as insulting. I've gotten a lot of help from this forum, and I'd like to think I've helped others at least a bit. But...any of us would need details about how what you're hearing is different from what you want to hear. The answer is probably out there, but it could be almost anything.
 
I think one of the misconceptions people have when using a modeler is that the tone should just be automatically awesome. The goal of the Fractal (as I understand it) is to accurately simulate real amps, at least as a starting point - I know I've heard plenty of real amps that because of how they are set, or played through, sound like hot garbage! I mean, it's not like before digital modeling, every tube amp in every situation just sounded perfect and nobody did any tweaking.

If it needs to be "warmed up" I'd suggest EQ - maybe cutting ~2kHz, boosting some low mids, rolling off the highs in the cab block, experimenting with some light compression at the end of the chain as was mentioned already, picking a different IR, adjusting the tone controls on the amp itself, or subtly mixing in some room reverb (especially since you described the sound you're going for as being in a space). The tones are in there - I think if you go in with the mindset that "this is digital" you'll give up far sooner than you would with a "real" amp.

Also, fwiw I have never used any of the presets - for whatever reason, they just weren't my thing, I've only ever used my own presets live or in the studio. So just build a simple one starting with the amp and cab, and set it like it was a real amp.

Much of the "feel" of a tube amp also comes down to volume - you're not gonna rattle your sternum sitting in front of computer speakers ;)
 
Cainer said:
I think one of the misconceptions people have when using a modeler is that the tone should just be automatically awesome. The goal of the Fractal (as I understand it) is to accurately simulate real amps, at least as a starting point - I know I've heard plenty of real amps that because of how they are set, or played through, sound like hot garbage! I mean, it's not like before digital modeling, every tube amp in every situation just sounded perfect and nobody did any tweaking.
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^This^

https://forum.fractalaudio.com/threads/ears-not-eyes.125212/
 
a less snarky repy....typically for me, when people say warmth, they are referring to off axis listening position they play in while their open back cabinet bounces rear of cabinet sound of the walls behind the speaker combining to create the illusion of a sound that is much bouncier, warmer, easier to play etc...but it's an illusion and not at all indicative of what their tone actually sounds like. Recreate that experience with monitors etc and it gets much closer to what they think they are hearing from a cab. Heck even taking two studio monitors, putting one at your knees and one facing the wall will get you 80% there...
 
jlynnb1 said:
a less snarky repy....typically for me, when people say warmth, they are referring to off axis listening position they play in while their open back cabinet bounces rear of cabinet sound of the walls behind the speaker combining to create the illusion of a sound that is much bouncier, warmer, easier to play etc...but it's an illusion and not at all indicative of what their tone actually sounds like. Recreate that experience with monitors etc and it gets much closer to what they think they are hearing from a cab. Heck even taking two studio monitors, putting one at your knees and one facing the wall will get you 80% there...
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I don't necessarily think that facing one at the wall is an amazing idea, but I haven't tried it.

Putting a single (extra) studio monitor on a very short (like 8") speaker stand on the floor behind me was probably the single thing that convinced me that simulating an amp (at the time, it was with a DSM Simplifier) would work for me.

It wasn't "the same"(tm) as having an amp behind me. But, it was shockingly close. It's not quite the same setup (because my dog would knock it over), but I still use a single old studio monitor placed "wrong" for easy room sound at home. It's quiet, but...it's still as close as I feel like I can get without actually running into a cab.

Greg Ferguson said:
^This^

https://forum.fractalaudio.com/threads/ears-not-eyes.125212/
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I like how the example given in the first post is exactly what I do. Also, I love that amp. Also, that's exactly how I set up the replica tweed bassman I played last summer.
 

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Speaker cabinets and positioning them are kind of an unknown part of the amp+cab duo for many players. We tend to walk in and drop them on a stage without thinking about how their location is affected by the floor covering and proximity to the nearby walls or floor.

A cabinet with a given speaker or speakers will sound different depending on whether it’s open backed, partially-open, or closed. On top of that, raising it off the floor will make it sound different, just as putting it against a wall, 6 inches from the wall or a foot away. I think most players don’t stop to wonder why that is, but it’s important and it’s even more so when dealing with modelers and FRFR-type cabinets that we want to use to reproduce other cabinets.

This “warmth” thing is kind of a nebulous term, but to me it implies an emphasis on the lower range frequencies we hear from the cabinets. As the cabinet gets closer to a surface, whether it’s a floor or wall, the lows begin to reinforce or cancel depending on the frequency of the note. The overall sound changes and we can fine tune the sound without touching the modeler’s EQ by moving the cabinet. My EV PXM cabs have a lot more low end when I push them against the back wall than when they are a few feet away, and similarly, my 1x12 open back combo has a lot more low-end when I tip it against a back wall than when it’s sitting on a chair or an amp stand away from the wall. With the EVs, I don’t want that added low-end so I add a bit of low-cut to counteract the physics causing the boost.

Floor and surface coverings also affect the sound because the reflection of sound from tile, cement or bare plywood is different than carpet, grass or indoor-outdoor carpet. We get more highs with the first, which is probably a more accurate representation of the sound of the rig than the softer surface has, but if we’re used to something different it’s disconcerting and we don’t like it and start twiddling knobs even though the amp’s settings are the same as is the cabinet. The close-miked sound wouldn’t have changed because of the surfaces but twiddling the knobs would definitely affect it so FOH then would need to adjust to return your sound to the original, desired, sound, so it could be that fixing the immediate problem actually creates bigger problems elsewhere… sigh.

All that is to say that it’s not as simple as it seems it could be and positioning the cabinet(s) could be contributing to what it is that you don’t like about the sound you’re getting. Desktop monitors and big speaker cabinets for FOH and guitar or bass are all affected by the same thing, the positioning and immediate surfaces (plus the room’s acoustics). I don’t like the way the EV is affected, but I do like how the 1x12” combo gets more “gutsy” (another nebulous term) when they’re against the wall, and when I reverse the situation and have the EV in the middle of the floor it sounds “killer” and the combo sounds “weak”. Being aware of their designs and what the walls and floor do helps me control the sound so I don’t go too “nuts”.

Hopefully this long-winded comment helps.
 
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