lead tone sounds digital..... :|

mgavin

mgavin

Experienced
I'm having trouble putting together a good lead tone as i don't have access to midi at the moment. Could someone please give me a good lead tone text signal chain, left to right, and how to set things like compression, graphic eq, and whatever else, etc. ? please! i'm sick of my lead tone sounding digital..... i have a ultra and a powered wedge and would like to find a good fusion lead tone like guthrie govans...!
 
Without wanting to derail the thread, I've never understood what "sounds digital" really means, but I suspect it means different things to different people, so I urge you to post again with exactly what it is about your sound you don't like. Too much highs? Not enough mids (thin sound)? Flubbly bass? Harsh distortion? etc. Also, what are you using to listen to your AxeFX - headphones? studio monitors, FRFR, guitar cab?

Most people use the phrase "digital sound" to imply something undesirable, but fwiw, here are some attributes of digital sound:

(1) High quality digital processing can reproduce analog sound exactly. Not a close approximation - identical.
(2) Digital processing has a wider and flatter frequency response than most analog gear, certainly more than typical guitar stomp boxes, amps and cabs.
(3) Ditto for dynamic range.

So if you perceive something bad in your tone, it may be related to the more powerful capabilities of digital processing.
 
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the distortions on the amps just sound fake to me i can't figure out how to set up a good signal chain and how to properly set up compression and what all the #s and stuff really mean. I scoop the mids and it sounds thin, i turn up the mids and it sounds quacky...

i'm looking for some tones like these YouTube - Melodic Series 1 Promo featuring Guthrie Govan

and some of his heavier leads like on waves or erotic cakes
 
Sure, let's try something !

BB PRE : drive 0 / tone 10 / lvl 5

CORNCOB : drive and master 5 / bass mid treb presence and hi freq resonance 10

4x12 30W : no mic / air 35% at 3500 hz
 
Was just checking out some of than Govan Guthrie stuff. Great player! - Will have to get me some Itunes of that!

Add a little delay after the cab in speedloader's suggestion. Compress a bit at the front of the chain to taste for a bit more sustain (may require noise gate to be active).
 
hey speedloader thanks for the post. just tried it/ it sounds glassy to me, there's just something about these distortions that sound terrible.... like processed and fake. i'm considering trading in my axefx for a cornford rk100...but hopefully some new impulse responses can fix this. maybe it's the cab sims maybe it's the amp sims... i find that i love the cleans i can get... but not heavy distortions :(
 
My tube amp with IRs or a SM57+cab were not sounding more natural than the axe-fx .. as far as I know, mic'ed cabs always feel like that, it's just masked by the mix or loud volume on stage. (I may be utterly wrong, though ..)
 
GM Arts said:
Without wanting to derail the thread, I've never understood what "sounds digital" really means
Click to expand...

That's because as an adjectorial phrase, it seems ignorant of the fact that old school low sample rate/bit depth digital, which had a signature lo-fi sound with artefacts and bandwidth constraints, is essentially a thing of the past.
 
Make sure your cab sim isn't bypassed, and cabs are enabled globally. Some people say that running FRFR without a cab sim "sounds digital."
 
Rex said:
Make sure your cab sim isn't bypassed, and cabs are enabled globally. Some people say that running FRFR without a cab sim "sounds digital."
Click to expand...
Also, if you're running FRFR, try the farfield IRs first, or use PEQ high and low band blocking with nearfield IRs.

Your desciption of "sounds fake" isn't any more helpful than "sounds digital". Without some specific descriptions about what it is in your tone you don't like, this thread is starting to sound fake :-(
 
i have the bigbox impulse responses ready to go i just don't have a midi connection yet, i guess the only other way to describe the sound i dislike is that it sounds processed and glassy/ and doesn't resonate like a true tube amplifier. i'm also only comparing high gain stuff and dive bombs... it just decays weird / fast even w/ no gate. essentially it just doesn't sound like my friends cornford rk100 and i'm just slightly disappointed that it the axe doesn't truly emulate this amplifier. i'll try and post some clips tmrw.


if anyone could provide a text example of a nice heavy lead sound that sounds good to you via frfr/ atomic powered cab/wedge i'd love to see what you got.
 
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maybe i should just purchase an rk100 amp head to supplement the axe and turn off amp sims because i definitely dig the effects and look forward to getting an mfc101....
 
Try messing around with the Thump and Warm controls. Even dialling in little bits on each helps liven things up. Also try turning up the gain on both the stomp box and the amp, and try to find a balance between too much and too little.
 
I'm still trying to understand what the sonic problems are. Unfortunately, "processed" doesn't give me much to go on, and a lot of people like "glassy." And tube amps don't resonate.

If it sounds really bad to you, new IRs won't fix it (you can't even install them if you don't have a MIDI connection). Please do post some clips. That will help. Meanwhile, if you can give us a text description of the patch you're using, that would help.
 
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