Here is that preset. I don't personally care for it but...
http://javajunkiemusic.com/Audio/crankedplexi.syx
http://javajunkiemusic.com/Audio/crankedplexi.syx
... it depends on ears training...HOWEVER, the relative hardness of clipping is not all that audible.
What's cool is that the cliff and the axe so often make us have to rethink our basic notions of how amps work, how we hear and what we hear. So often someone says they're this HORRIBLE bug in the axe that is NEVER EVER heard in an amp. And then we find that the axe is so accurate that in desperation to find flaws in the axe we are really finding flaws in the original amps.
i attribute hearing the ghost fizz to developing a better ear. i never heard it before, probably because is was mostly listening through guitar cabinets that rolled off the highs. now that i have good studio monitors and headphones at my disposal, i'm hearing all kinds of crap that i never heard before.
i actually went back to one of my 1995 recordings and listened to the intro of a song that i did with my guitar volume control rolled way back to "clean"......and sure enough, the ghost fizz is there even more than the axe-fx creates. lol.
This, this and this!this reminds me of how shocked people were to hear EVH's tracks by themselves. They couldn't believe how "fizzy" and "thin" etc, etc.....but that's exactly what gave it the mojo it had and why it sat/cut so well in a mix.
i attribute hearing the ghost fizz to developing a better ear. i never heard it before, probably because is was mostly listening through guitar cabinets that rolled off the highs. now that i have good studio monitors and headphones at my disposal, i'm hearing all kinds of crap that i never heard before.
i actually went back to one of my 1995 recordings and listened to the intro of a song that i did with my guitar volume control rolled way back to "clean"......and sure enough, the ghost fizz is there even more than the axe-fx creates. lol.
Incidentally, without that decay characteristic you lose the "crack" on the note attack. So the two are interrelated.
This, this and this!
Anyone who thinks the Axe is to fizzy should spend some time comparing famous commercial recordings with the naked guitar tracks from those recordings. It's a real eye-opener.
Where do you get those?I've been doing that as of late. Not only that but hum, buzz, and noise bleed. A lot of the tones, that if were pasted here out of context, would get blasted for being so-so or downright bad. Put them in a mix though and they really just work.
I've been doing that as of late. Not only that but hum, buzz, and noise bleed. A lot of the tones, that if were pasted here out of context, would get blasted for being so-so or downright bad. Put them in a mix though and they really just work.
That's the whole point. These guitar tracks do indeed represent what the audio engineer had to start with—the sound coming from the amp. It doesn't matter whether they've been processed or not. The fizz you hear comes from the amp, not from a signal processor.The question I have is whether these solo guitar tracks are unprocessed recordings of the mic'd amp or if they are the processed solo'd channel of the actual mix. The raw amp recordings very likely didn't get printed to tape in the final mix, so it's only an exercise in hearing what the audio engineer had to start with.
Stems are the sources used during mixdown.If these stem tracks were extracted from the mix using filtering software...
That's why the new firmware lets you chose from combinations of authentic, smooth and ideal modeling.Sometimes you want the sizzle to cut through the mix, and sometimes you want to be big & fat & smooth to fill the mix.
The "fizziness" of clipping is determined by how "hard" the clipping is. There are three primary places that clipping occurs in a tube amp: the preamp tubes, the phase inverter and the power tube plates.
Preamp tube clipping can range from soft to hard depending upon the design. Phase inverter (PI) clipping, which is actually the power tubes grids clipping, is very hard. Power tube clipping ranges from soft to hard depending upon the amount of negative feedback in the power amp.
Preamp tube clipping is comprised of cutoff, which is soft, plus saturation, which tends to be hard. Actual saturation rarely occurs because most preamp stages are designed such that the grid clips before the tube enters saturation. Grid clipping is hard. Local negative feedback is used in the form of cathode caps to shape the response of a preamp stage. If there is no cathode cap then there is negative feedback at all frequencies which increases the hardness of the clipping. The last stage usually dominates the clipping. Some amps have no cathode cap on this stage, e.g. JCM800, and therefore have hard preamp clipping. The Axe-Fx II does not expose the negative feedback settings for the preamp stages to the user, these are hard-coded. Reducing the Triode Hardness parameter will soften the clipping more-or-less depending upon the particular amp model.
In a typical tube amp the power tubes start to clip right about the same time the PI/grid clipping occurs. This is intentional so as to get the most power from the tubes. However some amps are intentionally mismatched as the designer's intent was to get more power tube clipping than PI clipping (i.e. Trainwrecks). The Transformer Match parameter adjusts the relative onset of power tube vs. PI/grid clipping. Lower values will cause the PI/grid clipping to occur before power tube clipping. Higher values will cause the power tubes to clip before the PI. Note that the power tube plates follow the impedance curve of the speaker so while the PI/grid may be designed to start clipping first, this only occurs in the midrange. At frequencies above 1 kHz or so the power tubes clip first since the voltage on the plates increases as a function of the speaker impedance. The first thing to clip tends to dominate as once you enter clipping the effect of clipping elsewhere is diminished.
Negative feedback around the power amp attempts to linearize the transfer function. The more negative feedback the more the power amp is linearized. However this also causes the clipping to become harder. A power amp with no negative feedback will go into clipping softly. As you increase the negative feedback the "knee" gets sharper. The Damping parameter is the negative feedback control. Higher values give more feedback and harder clipping.
Presence and Depth work by modifying the negative feedback. As you increase them the feedback gets less so by turning up the Presence you get softer clipping in the power amp.
Therefore to decrease the hardness of the power amp clipping: reduce Damping, increase Presence, increase Transformer Match.
To reduce preamp clipping hardness reduce Triode Hardness.
There is no parameter exposed to adjust the PI hardness.
HOWEVER, the relative hardness of clipping is not all that audible. You have to listen closely. The IR is far more important in the final result. Some IRs let through a lot more high frequencies and therefore sound more fizzy.
Furthermore overanalyzing this is inadvisable. Many amps are specifically designed to clip hard as this gives a more aggressive tone that fits better in the mix. Some amps actually attempt to increase the hardness of the clipping as much as possible by using diode clipping or using very high values of negative feedback (i.e. Modded Marshalls, Camerons, 5150 III). Listening at low levels fools your ear. Our ears are more sensitive to midrange at low listening levels. This means we hear the clipping differently than when listening at the actual level the real amp would be generating.