Line6 PodXT - can it make a tolerable tone?

aziz

aziz

Power User
I just bought a PodXT for shtf-backup, if the Axe ever goes down on a gig. Well, it sounds hilariously bad, about as fun as licking a battery. The plastic high gain nintendo tones might be useful in some joke songs, but is it possible to get a tolerable mid gain allround gig tone from this?

(I remember playing the first POD when it came out, and while it wasn't good back then, I still felt it was better than the XT when I tried it when that one came out some years later. I don't know, maybe I just imagined it.)
 
I got passable tones out of it. with some of the modeling packs. I have an xtLive that has the metal and another pack on it. just have to mess with it.
 
the thing i realized with high gain Line 6 recorded tones is... although they sound laughable soloed a lot of the time, they actually sit really well in a mix. It's almost as if they are already mixed and EQed to fit. My 2 cents on that.
 
I have an XTLive for a long time, and it was a decent all-in-one rig. I never loved the tones, but they were usable if tweaked a bit. The factory presets are over-the-top with too much of everything - pretty typical for effect presets where they want to show you all the madness the unit is capable of delivering. I found I had to lower the gain, ditch a lot of the effects, lower the mix on the remaining effects, and then do some eq-ing. But it produced decent enough sounds, and was handy for a single unit.

It's beautiful to hear the AxeFX presets. They are usable right out of the gate, and most of them are already balanced for "real musical" use. There are few trippy presets, too, and they're an interesting starting point for doing a bit of exploring. One example : my Bowie tribute plays "Heroes", and there is a cool chattering / filter sweep sound that comes in at several points during the song. I started with a sequenced filter preset and realized it could be tweaked into the sound I needed. It uses my live guitar input as the source, and processes it in tap tempo. I put it on a parallel audio path, and use one of my EV-1 pedals to roll up the volume at the appropriate point. We play that song live and people always ask our keyboard player about that "sample" he's playing there, and he shrugs and points over at me.
 
Having played an HD500 over the weekend, I'd say no. But, I'm so used to high end stuff, owning the AxeFX II and a Tone King amp that I'd say my opinion is slightly skewed. If you want to slather on effects and gain I suppose it would sound okay. But the clean Fender sounds on the HD500 sounded digital and lifeless. And that's the generation ahead of the XTLive.
 
My two bandmates use the XTLive. I hate it. I brought one to my house to create tones while comparing them to my Ultra (which I use live). The main limitations IMO are a severe lack of cabinet choices and an extremely poor equalization section. You have a single eq block with high and low shelfs and two semi-parametric bands. That's it. The cabs all sound one-dimensional and fake. After much effort, we came up with some tones that are usable, but not ideal.

The fx are extremely limited as well. Some people are frustrated by too many parameters on the Axe. I found the XTLive frustrating because I had no where to go when shaping a tone; I hit a dead end (far short of my goal) with nothing left to adjust.

It can make a decent high gain preamp tone and a decent clean tone, but the elusive mid-gain power amp distortion tone is beyond its capability.
 
steadystate said:
It can make a decent high gain preamp tone and a decent clean tone, but the elusive mid-gain power amp distortion tone is beyond its capability.
Click to expand...

This has been my experience, as well. I used the POD XTLive for two years, before buying the Axe-Fx ULTRA in 2008. I got a decent pushed clean and a decent lead tone, but very little else usable.
 
I used the XT-Live for a couple of years gigging.
It was compact and probably sounded ok.

I took it out of the boneyard a couple of months ago, plugged in and played it.
Couldn't believe how muffled and non-dynamic it is compared to the Fractal.

I put it back in the boneyard within a couple of minutes.

it's good to reflect on how far we've come...
 
On a slightly related note, I dug my old GX700 out of the loft the other day. It was the first direct-to-live-desk processor that I started using almost two decades ago.

Plugged in and expected it to be awful... but it was surprisingly nice for clean and slightly broken stuff - not so great for more driven tones... although it could do '80s hair metal lead stuff pretty well!

GX700-10.jpg
 
I was happy with the clean tones and modulation type effects but the distorted tones on the POD XT Live gave me ear fatigue. The monitors I was using at the time were a pair of Behringer BT2031A's. Maybe the distortion tones would have been better with a different pair of monitors.
 
UnsungHeroGuitars said:
On a slightly related note, I dug my old GX700 out of the loft the other day. It was the first direct-to-live-desk processor that I started using almost two decades ago.

Plugged in and expected it to be awful... but it was surprisingly nice for clean and slightly broken stuff - not so great for more driven tones... although it could do '80s hair metal lead stuff pretty well!
Click to expand...

Clive
I still have mine also-first processor I ever owned.

I fool around with it from time to time. Nice pic :)
 
I tweaked a bit before band practise and got something usable in medium crunch territory. It's funny how the tone falls apart with small changes in anything. Adjust the gain, treble or presence and it is gone! Most of the amp models are hilarious.
 
UnsungHeroGuitars said:
On a slightly related note, I dug my old GX700 out of the loft the other day. It was the first direct-to-live-desk processor that I started using almost two decades ago.

Plugged in and expected it to be awful... but it was surprisingly nice for clean and slightly broken stuff - not so great for more driven tones... although it could do '80s hair metal lead stuff pretty well!
Click to expand...

I still have two of them. Like you, I pulled it out for comparison. The mid and high gain amps are awful; worse than I remember.

But I was also reminded of what I liked about it. If you keep the effects in the same order, the preset changes are gapless (the GP-100 gapped). The thing hardly weighs anything. A great unit for its time (before modelling was a serious pro option).

What I really liked about it, even better than the Axe FX, is the way in which you can set up a custom harmony with the pitch shifter. You play the note to which you want to harmonize, move the cursor, then play the harmony note you desire. And you can do this for each of the 12 notes of the scale. Super easy. Additionally, the custom harmonies were stored per-preset, with two custom scales per preset, making a total of 256 custom scales possible. Even the Axe II only has 32 (I don't count the non-global scales because they are limited and difficult to set up). I'm not sure why the Axe only has 32 global custom scales, but there must be a reason.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom