solo-act
Fractal Fanatic
"I've come to gig with you again
because a countdown started from the blue,
it made me sell my Ultra, yes it's true..."
No wait -- maybe it's more like this:
"Hey, it's good to gig with you again
I know you're not my standard but you feel like a long lost friend
yes, 'n hey it's good to gig with you again"
After 3 weeks gigging without my beloved Ultra and waiting for the II to come out, Electron Pirate, a fellow forum member, took pity and offered his standard to tide me over, and I just gigged with it last night. But not before the most frenzied dialing session I've ever undertaken.
It was like an axe-fx version of "back to the future" complete with "GREAT SCOTT!" and a lightning-infused race against time (nearly flamed my tires getting to the gig too).
I literally went from firmware 3 up to 11 in a few hours, hauling about 50 completely different presets with me. After I dumped my last axe-fx Standard bank A backup (Sept '07 just before I sold for the Ultra) into EP's Standard, I barely recognized them. They sounded mangled and mummified...liked I'd unearthed them from the bowels of egypt or something.
So the pre-gig race to bring 'em up to 11.0 spec was on. Along the way and among the detritus of presets past, I discovered some preserved tones and attitudes I'd lost over a Cliff-coding marathon of -- let me count them here -- THIRTY firmware updates I've imposed onto my mortgage-paying presets. That's just what I've used. Cliff's probably done double that in actual firmware updates.
Then I started wailing on tone. Good news was I could skip a lot of parameters because they simply didn't exist back in FW 3.0. And on some amps I'd only tweaked non-advanced parameters. That meant lots of them could be dialed by ear before referencing for mix-fit and balance. But a bunch of them were so trapped in time, I ended up loading my last Ultra backup into Axe-Edit just to reference settings.
Now I know what the beta guys were going through re-creating factory presets in the II. I prolly could've dumped some Ultra presets directly into the standard, but some wouldn't fit, and others might've cause more problems than a simple reference tweak would cause.
All in all, it was sweet doing a light load-in again and being a versatile, low-volume monster for my restaurant gig. Ironically, they dig the backing tracks and electric guitar work, and the axe-fx is really the only thing that truly shines in an intimate, low volume environment like that.
Yes standard...even though you're not mine, it's good to gig with you again.
BTW, the low end definition in 11.0 is excellent, and the feel seems improved. Some of my presets translated 1-to-1 in values so I had a memory reference to work from, and the power amp tweak is really nice.
These "vintage" Axe-Fxs ROCK!!
because a countdown started from the blue,
it made me sell my Ultra, yes it's true..."
No wait -- maybe it's more like this:
"Hey, it's good to gig with you again
I know you're not my standard but you feel like a long lost friend
yes, 'n hey it's good to gig with you again"
After 3 weeks gigging without my beloved Ultra and waiting for the II to come out, Electron Pirate, a fellow forum member, took pity and offered his standard to tide me over, and I just gigged with it last night. But not before the most frenzied dialing session I've ever undertaken.
It was like an axe-fx version of "back to the future" complete with "GREAT SCOTT!" and a lightning-infused race against time (nearly flamed my tires getting to the gig too).
I literally went from firmware 3 up to 11 in a few hours, hauling about 50 completely different presets with me. After I dumped my last axe-fx Standard bank A backup (Sept '07 just before I sold for the Ultra) into EP's Standard, I barely recognized them. They sounded mangled and mummified...liked I'd unearthed them from the bowels of egypt or something.
So the pre-gig race to bring 'em up to 11.0 spec was on. Along the way and among the detritus of presets past, I discovered some preserved tones and attitudes I'd lost over a Cliff-coding marathon of -- let me count them here -- THIRTY firmware updates I've imposed onto my mortgage-paying presets. That's just what I've used. Cliff's probably done double that in actual firmware updates.
Then I started wailing on tone. Good news was I could skip a lot of parameters because they simply didn't exist back in FW 3.0. And on some amps I'd only tweaked non-advanced parameters. That meant lots of them could be dialed by ear before referencing for mix-fit and balance. But a bunch of them were so trapped in time, I ended up loading my last Ultra backup into Axe-Edit just to reference settings.
Now I know what the beta guys were going through re-creating factory presets in the II. I prolly could've dumped some Ultra presets directly into the standard, but some wouldn't fit, and others might've cause more problems than a simple reference tweak would cause.
All in all, it was sweet doing a light load-in again and being a versatile, low-volume monster for my restaurant gig. Ironically, they dig the backing tracks and electric guitar work, and the axe-fx is really the only thing that truly shines in an intimate, low volume environment like that.
Yes standard...even though you're not mine, it's good to gig with you again.
BTW, the low end definition in 11.0 is excellent, and the feel seems improved. Some of my presets translated 1-to-1 in values so I had a memory reference to work from, and the power amp tweak is really nice.
These "vintage" Axe-Fxs ROCK!!
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