Is Neal Schon still using the Axe Fx III?

It's fun to see how gear reacts. For me, one and done options including holy grail amps wear on you the same. After a while, you can really enjoy a Gorilla just because it's different.
 
Nothing’s special . Amateurs got already sometimes 3 heads and a axe at home, so imagine when you have even more money and roadies who bring your stuff …. Do you prefer to play with the original or the copy, if you really have the choice ? Changing gear and having a lot of models is something “normal” to me, I love changing guitar at every session of playing because of the mood of the day or … playing with one guitar and one amp ? No way. Bo-ring . That is one of the reason I have an axe . I like changing sound .
 
My name is mud said:
. Do you prefer to play with the original or the copy, if you really have the choice ?
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THE AXE EVERY SINGLE DAY, cant do even 5% of what you can do with the axe on the real amp its extremely extremely limiting. People find stock tube amp tones good enough cause they never tried something else, why would one stop at copying what a tube amp does when axe does so so so much more. Now this is a matter of personal preference i understand, but to simulate and”copy” a tube amp , i think that point in modelling passed long long back i think we need to move much more forward now.

My name is mud said:
I love changing guitar at every session of playing because of the mood of the day or … playing with one guitar and one amp ? No way.
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This can depend, the other way to look at it is you can get different feel for everything with one guitar itself if we utilize axe to its potential. Yes as you say Thats the limiting factor of amps if you ask me, need different guitar for different sound, but on axe same guitar 100 sounds.
 
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rrhoads17 said:
Everytime I see Neal, I notice he has a different amp behind him. Right now, it looks like he is using the EVH 5150 III EL34, but I also saw him play at a football stadium recently with a couple of Marshall amps. Then a while back he actually endorsed Blackstar Amps. Is he really just using the Fractal for all of his tones and basically banking other amp endorsements or does he just use those amps as a cool looking backline with dummy cabs?
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You could ask him. Lol. He’s very responsive on Instagram.
 
There’s a FB group I’m in where they frequently discuss Neal, the last I saw was when he got the two EVH’s and was using an FM9 for effects and the amps for amp stuff.

Did anyone happen to catch him freaking out all over FB this past week over that CNN host? I guess the guy called them “Fake Journey” on air which lit Neal up, causing him to rant about it in every single post after NYE. I like how he capitalized “The Founder” and posted a pic of himself in one of them. :D
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RevDrucifer said:
There’s a FB group I’m in where they frequently discuss Neal, the last I saw was when he got the two EVH’s and was using an FM9 for effects and the amps for amp stuff.

Did anyone happen to catch him freaking out all over FB this past week over that CNN host? I guess the guy called them “Fake Journey” on air which lit Neal up, causing him to rant about it in every single post after NYE. I like how he capitalized “The Founder” and posted a pic of himself in one of them. :D
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Two best things about the lame ball drop were journey and this asshats meltdown. Lol
 
TSJMajesty said:
A drummer friend who used to work at PRS said NS was one of the hardest guitarists to work with, in terms of him having so many different tastes. They actually made him TWO signature guitars, of which my buddy said was the lowest ROI for any artist's guitar. I believe he told me they were both essentially the same guitar, but one had a 1" smaller body width. I took all that to mean he either just loves all sorts of gear and enjoys playing it all, or he's kinda fickle. Yeah, must be nice! But for a guy who can write guitar solos that you sing along with in your car, he's got it going on!
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I remember going to the PRS Factory when they had the 30th anniversary(was my 1st time there) and me and my wife just walking around looking at the stuff in the factory, and we came across Neal's NS14's in a rack during mid build, When i was talking to the builder that was standing there to answer questions he pretty much said they loved the guitar but hated having to make the heel transition, it was basically a pain in the ass getting it right (very much like a Les Paul Axcess Heel) he said. I played one one day and though its a pain for them it was a really nice heel transition, id still like to get one but there impossible to find and expensive when they come up.
 
jin1995x said:
THE AXE EVERY SINGLE DAY, cant do even 5% of what you can do with the axe on the real amp its extremely extremely limiting. People find stock tube amp tones good enough cause they never tried something else, why would one stop at copying what a tube amp does when axe does so so so much more. Now this is a matter of personal preference i understand, but to simulate and copy a "tube amp" , i think that point in modelling passed long long back i think we need to move much more forward now.


This can depend, the other way to look at it is you can get different feel for everything with one guitar itself if we utilize axe to its potential. Yes as you say Thats the limiting factor of amps if you ask me, need different guitar for different sound, but on axe same guitar 100 sounds.
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Yes but at a moment you need to choose one amp and one sound to your band too 😅. you dont change amps at every song live and you use the same amp for the main distortion of an album, even with an axe . It was the hardest part with the last album “ok, so what will be my main dist preset for all the songs ?” When you have hundreds of dist it’s difficult to choose one. If I only had the JP2c , it resolve the problem more quicker 😅

in a band context, just a project, you don’t need all these amps . Presets yes, effects … clean rythm lead … but these guys got a main dist for everything so they can stick to one amp and some pedals . It explains why they are all these kemper on stage . They just want their amps copy and some details even if it sound worse than the axe … then People do what they want . Some like to have originals, some not ..

same for music records … an iTunes library or a wall of vinyls 🙄

personally I like to own the real deal and if I was rich I prefer to have 100 amps in a room with 100 guitars better than a modeler and a variax 🙄. Not saying that it’s bad hm . They don’t lift their gear so ….
 
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My name is mud said:
Yes but at a moment you need to choose one amp and one sound to your band too 😅. you dont change amps at every song live and you use the same amp for the main distortion of an album, even with an axe . It was the hardest part with the last album “ok, so what will be my main dist preset for all the songs ?” When you have hundreds of dist it’s difficult to choose one. If I only had the JP2c , it resolve the problem more quicker 😅

in a band context, just a project, you don’t need all these amps . Presets yes, effects … clean rythm lead … but these guys got a main dist for everything so they can stick to one amp and some pedals . It explains why they are all these kemper on stage . They just want their amps copy and some details even if it sound worse than the axe … then People do what they want . Some like to have originals, some not ..

same for music records … an iTunes library or a wall of vinyls 🙄

personally I like to own the real deal and if I was rich I prefer to have 100 amps in a room with 100 guitars better than a modeler and a variax 🙄. Not saying that it’s bad hm . They don’t lift their gear so ….
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Certainly in a live only context we dont wanna mess with what an audience hears when we have something that works,.

100GUITARS 100 AMPS 100 cabs sounds cool as long as you dont have to connect the cables , arrange them and restring the 100 guitars lmao.

How did your album come through? Excited for it?
 
The thing is that we cannot play since nearly 2 years now, and once again Gigs are not allowed in Europe with omicron 🤦, so you wait before release…. Records without gigs, when you are small… 😬🙄 . I don’t have seen a live show since 2 years, that’s crazy seriously .
Well we are completely out of topic .
 
A live player with decades worth of well-known hits has a different problem.
You don't want radical changes of tone for every song, but you're "covering" a ton of different rigs, recording and mixing styles, and playing approaches.
It wouldn't surprise me at all for someone in that situation to choose an Axe as the perfect solution.
 
Have you seen his ax3 rack rig ? It’s massive - extremely complex but it’s incredible. He goes back & forth between using all axe & axe blended with a dry amp/cab. He used an fm9 blended w the evh amps for their recent Vegas residency etc
 
ruso said:
Probably. I still find it hard to believe that artists like John Petrucci don’t do this when they went through the trouble to model their personal amplifier.
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Compared to the trouble of designing an amplifier? Using a modeled preset kinda defeats the purpose of the physical amplifier existing, not a good business move. I think he said he uses the Axe in practice rooms during tours.
 
Deasnutz said:
Compared to the trouble of designing an amplifier? Using a modeled preset kinda defeats the purpose of the physical amplifier existing, not a good business move. I think he said he uses the Axe in practice rooms during tours.
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I mainly bought the Axe as an effects processor first, so all the amp models were icing on the cake. But if I could get all my live tones from one amp, and I had the means to use it live (the amps dialed in, funds to own enough to cover stereo + backup, roadies to set it up, switching rig for it, etc.), there's no way I'd even consider using a modeler, no matter how good it is, not even weighing in the fact that said amp was not only my signature amp, but the first and only one of its kind. Seems a no-brainer to me.
 
Me and a few of my buddies love to rag on Neal. He's a legend, incredible player and responsible for some of pop cultures most memorable tunes. But hes also kinda hilariously into himself. I love journey and Hardline. I know for vegas he did a FM9 into the EVH heads, but on NYE it was all backlined gear so its a tossup of what was there. Him going off in comments is nothing new. I really didnt like his approach to the JSS stuff the week before. Jeff bailed them out of a bad situation and never gets the real acknowledgement for it.
 
I just wish he’d use his impressive pile of gear to write a hit song again. Hell, I’ll take a song I want to hear twice at this point.
 
Bit of a tangent, but something I always think of when Neal comes up:

Kim Flint worked on the original Oberheim Echoplex Digital Pro (later became the Gibson Echoplex Digital Pro Plus). In 1996, he recounted showing the EDP to Neal:
It's easy for me to poke fun at Journey and Neal, being journey and all,
but he really is a pretty good musician. When I was first showing him how
to use the Echoplex, for some reason he decided to record a solo first, and
overdub the rhythm part. He had over 30 seconds worth of rock guitar solo
looping, and starts overdubbing chord progressions with it. I'm thinking
"you can't do that, it's impossible to get that in time. I'm never gonna be
able to teach this guy to do this right." He stops playing the rhythm
part, and I realize that its perfectly in time with the solo, and that he
finished playing exactly at the end of a pretty long loop. Not only that,
the solo he played in the first place was in time and was an even number of
beats in length so that it fit perfectly into an ordinary sort of rock
progression. My respect for his musicianship went up a lot right then,
because I sure as hell couldn't do that.
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https://loopersdelight.com/cgi-bin/wilma_hiliter/LDarchive/199611/msg00248.html?line=77#hilite
 
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