jlynnb1
Axe-Master
I love the Axe but still think that there are far to many Amps/Caps not sounding very good. It sounds if (many of them) only the Eq has been set differently. Hard to hear the signature difference between them. Especially the caps are really hard to find the "one" or "ones". 95% is only variyng in the eq expression. When this is said it could be me not capable of setting thing's right and that could be the problem with Axe in general. I tweak and tweak and can't hear s... after half hour and the next day it sounds different to me again starting to adjust again. Far to many factors going into the sound when you also have guitar, pickups, caps, amps to select in Axe lib. So I thought that and really good pre amp/amp would be easyier to get a good setting and easy to adjust on the fly. This is damn hard one the Axe if you don't know the effect of almost most parameters. But for peoble who likes to adjust forever, buying new caps, downloading new firmware in the seek of better sounding - that's also fun but not very produvtive I think.
So I went the Petrucci way having the basic sound (if one is not addicted to have 20 different basic sounding) coming from the Mesa setup (Triaxis, Mesa 2:90) and setting up a parrallel FX system having only the FX part from the Axe being digitized but leaving all the true signal from pre amp/master staying analouge. I feel the attack is much more aggressive and reacts faster. Takes up time to go through AD/DA converters and all the other digital stuff there is going on inside the Axe.
More in the clean section, I cannot get the rich sound (twang) out of my Fender Master built Strat (Jason Smith) as I can from a small Pandora rehearsel box. This is when using the Axe through the CLR's (FRFR) and Atomic 2x50 with Atomic passive reactors. All in all 4 caps driven from 3 amps. This beatiful sound never comes out of this extreme nice guitar and just wondering how much dammage there is done in this FRFR setup. I could have a shity guitar and in that combination the Axe could make it sound a hole lot better but not with very high end guitars. Kind of digitizing hell but agree - this is the best until now in this price level and still I use ALL the other effects but not the emulator anymore. This is done far better with traditional amps most of the time.
i disagree with just about everything here, lol...