I know this is a touchy subject but...

Matman said:
I've offered to others -- and extend to you -- an open channel: forum, email, phone, or face-to-face -- if you want to try to use the Axe-FX and get closer to what your ears dream about.

:)
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I sent you a PM the other day, did you get around reading it ?
 
Jay Mitchell said:
CudBucket said:
James, no insults from me. ;)

I created a patch yesterday so I could test the Axe in my WDW rig. I put a Chorus and Delay in the preset like this...

RTN -> CHO -> DLY -> FXL -> SND

This chaing goes out Out2 L and R to my wet amp/cab. I felt I could barely hear the Chorus with the default settings.
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Well, that's because the "wet" signal chain needs the "mix" parameter in all effects set to 100%.

Come to think of it, I'm not sure where the Mix was though (in all fairness).
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And that's the whole enchilada.
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That's right Jay. I had the Delay Mix at 100% but I doubt I did that for the Chorus.

Dave
 
Jay Mitchell said:
In my experience, if an effect is too clean, there's always a way to screw it up so it sounds crappy. OTOH, there's no way to go in the opposite direction.
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That's an excellent point... you can't polish a turd, but you sure can crap all over the nice clean floor. :D
 
Jay Mitchell said:
This is where the forum, the Wiki, and Axechange come in. My suggestion is to look for settings that others have shared that will enable you to duplicate the desired effects. If you can't find what you want, place a request in the "Share and Request Patches" forum.

While both approaches are equally legitimate, the end user cannot alter the approach that was taken in the design of a specific processor. It has been made very clear in the Axe-Fx documentation which approach was taken in its design.
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I think you're making my point.. :) ..I have a limited amount of time to spend in my basement with my toys. I prefer to spend my time playing guitar and writing and recording songs as opposed to downloading other people's patches on the website and test-driving them to see if they work for me. That is why I think an old school stomp-box or a stomp-box modeler approach might work better in some cases.

It's extremely clear to me what approach was taken in the design of the Axe-FX and I'm fine with that. It does what it was designed to do extremely well and I have used it as my only pre-amp and effects processor for about 60 gigs and to record several original songs. I think it could be the only box you ever need if the user has the time, knowledge, and patience to tweak it to meet your needs.
 
AdamCook said:
I think you're making my point.. :) ..I have a limited amount of time to spend in my basement with my toys. I prefer to spend my time playing guitar and writing and recording songs as opposed to downloading other people's patches on the website and test-driving them to see if they work for me. That is why I think an old school stomp-box or a stomp-box modeler approach might work better in some cases.

It's extremely clear to me what approach was taken in the design of the Axe-FX and I'm fine with that. It does what it was designed to do extremely well and I have used it as my only pre-amp and effects processor for about 60 gigs and to record several original songs. I think it could be the only box you ever need if the user has the time, knowledge, and patience to tweak it to meet your needs.
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See, but you really only need extra time to do it once. After that you'll know the tricks and can quickly dial it up (or just have it saved in a patch and copy the effect where needed). I guess I just don't follow the "I've spent significant time learning how to dial up a ton of things, but now I don't have time or don't wish to make time to learn how to dial in one more" mentality.

Or maybe it's just me... wouldn't be the first time. :lol:
 
AdamCook said:
I have a limited amount of time to spend in my basement with my toys. I prefer to spend my time playing guitar and writing and recording songs as opposed to downloading other people's patches on the website and test-driving them to see if they work for me. That is why I think an old school stomp-box or a stomp-box modeler approach might work better in some cases.
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I guess I don't understand how checking out/dialing in different conventional stompboxes (or models thereof) is substantially less time-consuming than downloading (or just plain entering manually) a set of parameter values into the Axe-Fx. In either case, you have to start somewhere and tweak settings to get the sound you're looking for. In the case of the A/DA flanger, for example, I found only a very small range of combined control settings that yielded (sort-of) tolerable sounds for my uses, and it took a decent amount of my time to arrive at those settings. In tweaking the effects I use in the Axe-Fx, I don't generally find myself spending much more time than I used to spend with separate boxes, with a handful of exceptions (e.g., there's nothing to tweak in a CryBaby). The extra time I do end up spending I would mostly characterize as "design" time, i.e., using capabilities in the Axe-Fx that do not exist in stompboxes to create new types of sounds. And, at the end of the day, I find I get a much greater return on time spent with the Axe-Fx than I ever got from time spent tweaking stompboxes.

I think it could be the only box you ever need if the user has the time, knowledge, and patience to tweak it to meet your needs.
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I agree. Even if you're just playing with stompboxes, however, you're going to have to spend a significant amount of time dialing in specific sounds. If any of the devices are nonlinear (e.g., compressor, drive box), you will also need to experiment with their order of placement in the signal chain. With physical devices, this requires disconnecting/repositioning/reconnecting, which I always found to be a PITA.

FWIW, I can fully relate to wanting to spend time just playing guitar and/or writing (I do more arranging than writing). When I feel that way, I just pick up an acoustic or one of my archtops and play with no amplification.
 
Jay Mitchell said:
I guess I don't understand how checking out/dialing in different conventional stompboxes (or models thereof) is substantially less time-consuming than downloading (or just plain entering manually) a set of parameter values into the Axe-Fx. In either case, you have to start somewhere and tweak settings to get the sound you're looking for. In the case of the A/DA flanger, for example, I found only a very small range of combined control settings that yielded (sort-of) tolerable sounds for my uses, and it took a decent amount of my time to arrive at those settings.
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Good point. I guess the way I think of a stomp-box or a stomp-box model vs the AxeFX effect is that the stomp-box already has a lot of the advance parameters pre-configured and the user is left to tweak just a few specific knobs. So this gives you less flexibility and in most cases less quality than the Axe-FX....but in some certain cases that pre-configuration of advanced parameters might be just want you want...

...and that kind of brings us back to the patch exchange suggestion. I guess the downloading thing would work better for me if it were a bit more formalized...for example a lot of the times I've gone searching for a certain sound but there aren't sound clips and what I download doesn't sound anything like the description. I think we can get there with some improvement though.
 
Well I tried the tips you guys gave me today. Tape drive, mix 100%, parallel, eq...

It helped a little. I'm sorry to say that no matter what I did, the effects still had that "studio" sound to them. Sure, it made them sound a little less polished but the character of the effect did not change.
 
james... said:
Well I tried the tips you guys gave me today. Tape drive, mix 100%, parallel, eq...

It helped a little. I'm sorry to say that no matter what I did, the effects still had that "studio" sound to them. Sure, it made them sound a little less polished but the character of the effect did not change.
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Did you turn the delay time down to around 4ms?
 
Jay Mitchell said:
You know, I've got exactly the opposite take on the whole analog stompbox syndrome. I've had a few over the years, including a CryBaby, Phase 90, a Mu-Tron II, and an ADA flanger. I never could get decent quality sounds out of any of those things. They were noisy, killed dynamics, loaded my guitars' pickups, and muffled the sound (particularly the ADA). I had no choice but to use them to create those sounds, however. Improving on that in live performance would only have been possible if you had studio-quality (read $$$$) line-level gear in the PA rack and a sound man competent enough to use those effects exactly as you wanted. In my experience, if an effect is too clean, there's always a way to screw it up so it sounds crappy. OTOH, there's no way to go in the opposite direction.

It is such a joy to be able to place effects of the very best sonic quality in the exact place in the signal chain I want them, yet still maintain total control over the whole rig, that I could not imagine ever using one of those wall-wart-powered, tone-sucking POS boxes ever again.

Just another POV....
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Absolutely agree.
 
Jay wrote:

I guess I don't understand how checking out/dialing in different conventional stompboxes (or models thereof) is substantially less time-consuming than downloading (or just plain entering manually) a set of parameter values into the Axe-Fx.
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phase90 = 1 knob
EVH flanger, evh mode = 1 button
A/DA Flanger= I already know the setting I like on it for the particular sound I was looking for (already put the time in, in the past)

The same can be said for the Axe-fx. I have effects setting I have already dialed in. I wouldn't want to be cloning them, if I could just use the axe-fx.
 
schnarf said:
james... said:
Well I tried the tips you guys gave me today. Tape drive, mix 100%, parallel, eq...

It helped a little. I'm sorry to say that no matter what I did, the effects still had that "studio" sound to them. Sure, it made them sound a little less polished but the character of the effect did not change.
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Did you turn the delay time down to around 4ms?
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Yes.
 
I am a newbie who has yet to take delivery of my Ultra, so forgive me if this is not possible:
I've found that putting, say, a Rotary & a Chorus in parallel with different mod speeds & depths gives satisfying results.
I previously did this with either a pair of Line ModPros, or a ModPro & Rocktron FX (Intelli etc).
Now hopefully getting rid of all that, & more, with the Ultra.

Over,
Bob.
 
My take on this is that you could get ANY sound with the Axe-FX. Especially the Ultra. Continuing in the vein of what Cliff and Jay said, if you have that nice pristine, clean, studio-type tone with which to start, "dirtying" it up is just a matter of doing things to make it happen. I like that I can get both types of tones out of the Ultra.

And I know it's a matter of personal taste as to what's "dirty" enough, but I have downloaded some chorus and delay patches off of axechange that sound pretty authenticly dirty to me. Some that javajunkie and matman@ did.

Also, like Jay said, even with an old school stompbox, you'd have to work to get the sound. Either way, it's work.
 
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