Simon Godden
Inspired
This is more a cautionary tale really. I know it could be argued that this is off topic and belongs in the gear forum, because in the end it's not about the Axe, but it is about getting the best results from the Axe. I think this is a subject that plagues many people for different reasons when they are struggling for tone with modellers, and I just thought I would share this, as it might help others to realise that the issue can be somewhere totally different in the chain of gear.
I've been struggling for ages to get great tones out of modellers, particularly in that transition from bedroom levels to rehearsal and gig levels. I know about the Fletscher-Munsen effect thanks to the marvellous @2112 . Despite that, for a long time, I have struggled at rehearsals with the sound being muddy, tons of mids and low mids that just don't sound good. With the modellers that I had before the Axe, I didn't even like the tones at bedroom level, but once I had the Axe I knew that the modeller could not be the issue. I messed around with EQ, spending many hours of my life that I would prefer to have spent actually playing.
All this time I had this nagging feeling - at louder volumes the sound should not feel bad. It might not feel AS epic as in the bedroom, but it should still sound basically good, and it should just be adjusting to taste to regain full epicness.
So last week I solved it, by accident, and felt like a fool for wasting a ton of time by not being more methodical. My rehearsal and gig rig is to go direct to FOH - at a gig I will have monitors, but not at a rehearsal, where we just set up the PA and point it at us so we know what the audience will hear on the night.
The PA is all FBT gear - they are a fabulous brand, with a brilliant reputation, so the problem can't be there right? Let's muck about with the EQ on the mixer. No no no....
I use one 112SA 12" Sub and two Stagemaxx 12ma monitors as the tops (they are multi-purpose and work great as FOH). All of this is active. For the size of venues we play there is no need to have a second sub.
On the Sub there is a button to activate a High Pass filter on the chained tops. I had this activated, and assumed this would do all that was needed, filtering out all the frequencies that the sub was handling. Last week I noticed that there is also a HP Filter button on the Stagemaxx's, and neither was activated. Oops.
I pressed the button in on both tops, and as if by magic, my ears were delighted. There must have been crossover in the frequency ranges being handled by the sub and the tops causing the excessive mids, and it just went away instantly. Now my life is transformed. Instead of tweaking and never feeling happy, I am pretty much always happy, and just tweaking to see what can sound even more epic. All the amps sound how I think they should, and my joy at owning an Axe is now fully unleashed. At a gig two days later, I got a ton of comments about epic tone, and enjoyed the best tone I can remember in 33 years of playing.
The moral of the tale for me is to be careful to RTFM on all the pieces of gear in the chain, and not jump to conclusions about where problems must be, or to just blindly thrash around hoping for solutions. This may sound idiotically obvious to most reading this forum, but I realise I could have saved a lot of time by being more methodical about my gear chain.
I've been struggling for ages to get great tones out of modellers, particularly in that transition from bedroom levels to rehearsal and gig levels. I know about the Fletscher-Munsen effect thanks to the marvellous @2112 . Despite that, for a long time, I have struggled at rehearsals with the sound being muddy, tons of mids and low mids that just don't sound good. With the modellers that I had before the Axe, I didn't even like the tones at bedroom level, but once I had the Axe I knew that the modeller could not be the issue. I messed around with EQ, spending many hours of my life that I would prefer to have spent actually playing.
All this time I had this nagging feeling - at louder volumes the sound should not feel bad. It might not feel AS epic as in the bedroom, but it should still sound basically good, and it should just be adjusting to taste to regain full epicness.
So last week I solved it, by accident, and felt like a fool for wasting a ton of time by not being more methodical. My rehearsal and gig rig is to go direct to FOH - at a gig I will have monitors, but not at a rehearsal, where we just set up the PA and point it at us so we know what the audience will hear on the night.
The PA is all FBT gear - they are a fabulous brand, with a brilliant reputation, so the problem can't be there right? Let's muck about with the EQ on the mixer. No no no....
I use one 112SA 12" Sub and two Stagemaxx 12ma monitors as the tops (they are multi-purpose and work great as FOH). All of this is active. For the size of venues we play there is no need to have a second sub.
On the Sub there is a button to activate a High Pass filter on the chained tops. I had this activated, and assumed this would do all that was needed, filtering out all the frequencies that the sub was handling. Last week I noticed that there is also a HP Filter button on the Stagemaxx's, and neither was activated. Oops.
I pressed the button in on both tops, and as if by magic, my ears were delighted. There must have been crossover in the frequency ranges being handled by the sub and the tops causing the excessive mids, and it just went away instantly. Now my life is transformed. Instead of tweaking and never feeling happy, I am pretty much always happy, and just tweaking to see what can sound even more epic. All the amps sound how I think they should, and my joy at owning an Axe is now fully unleashed. At a gig two days later, I got a ton of comments about epic tone, and enjoyed the best tone I can remember in 33 years of playing.
The moral of the tale for me is to be careful to RTFM on all the pieces of gear in the chain, and not jump to conclusions about where problems must be, or to just blindly thrash around hoping for solutions. This may sound idiotically obvious to most reading this forum, but I realise I could have saved a lot of time by being more methodical about my gear chain.
