Agreed. I've seen the band a few times in the 'Fractal Era' so this is so interesting to me. I'm quite analytical about guitar tone with Leppard since the Adrenalize tour. Their live sound really changed from there through Slang up to Mirror Ball live stuff. I could talk the hind legs off a donkey about this stuff lol.
I do like the Blackstar, I suppose being a combo it makes more sense at home. Whatever he plays it always sounds bloody awesome though.
FOH will adjust for venue acoustics etc.
I was about to drop about 8 inches worth of text pouring my heart out about how awesome fractal and this community is but you summed it up nicely…”having an affair”, hahahaha that was great.
I’m actually not quite sure what he’s doing out front - I do know that when I line check Phil’s rig it only takes a few seconds so I don’t think he’s doing much to it.
That low growl is something very distinctive in the live sound now. You know it sounds like a marshall but you know they're doing something in the tone shaping to make the characteristic different and i've often wondered what that was so to discover the three cab blend is very interesting. The live sound now is definitely a lower mids sound than it has been in the past.
What did you think of their tone when you saw them during the Adrenalize tour? I believe you posted earlier that you saw them in 92.
I saw them twice on that tour, once at the famous Don Valley Stadium show and again at Earl's Court where they did the show 'in the round'.
I saw the Don Valley show too and had seen them for the first time on their second night at the Sheffield arena the year before
Very much this! There's a very satisfying weight to it without excess bass content.
I do usually grab my own PC-1 if I'm working on sounds at home - it is one of his tour guitars that he was kind enough to gift me a couple of years ago (it's the one in the video) so it's a great reference for tweaking tones that we will use live. I don't typically change the basic amp tone for different guitars, so each one will have its own vibe. Once we get a feel for how they all sound through the rig, we'll figure out which ones suit certain songs. We do change it up throughout a tour, too. We also run the Fender Acoustasonic through the AxeFx for the acoustic section of the show, although it's pretty much straight in and out with no blocks engaged.
John, is the JMP-1 block based on Phil’s actual JMP-1 settings? Or was his modded by Voodoo Amps and the block had to be tweaked to sound like the modded one?
I spent the better part of a day going through IRs when we first got the units - it was definitely a bit overwhelming to see hundreds of cabs to choose from. I would just write down the ones that seemed pleasing to me, and then I would try various combinations of those. Somehow I arrived at those 3, although I still second-guess myself pretty regularly ("what if something else sounds even better???"). It's been that blend since 2018 though.
His JMP-1 units were stock (I think Viv's were modded). I actually didn't refer to those settings at all - I just went by ear. I pulled up a live recording that I would reference to make sure I was in the ballpark as I was tweaking.
I also thought that Rockman IRs sounded good with the JMP model. That would be interesting to hear since they have such a big history with the Rockman.
Now you're going down a rabbit hole that I'm very familiar with lol. Since the band started using Fractal I've often wondered if they would consider trying to replicate the actual guitar tones from the Hysteria album, with the Axe III because that was such a different sounding album and now you have the tech to do it a lot more easily - well that would be a job for John obviously!
