I am using the Cameron amp preset which has an awesome rhythm sound, nice and full, crunchy, nice bottom etc. The problem is when I do a solo it is quite thin sounding, almost as if I switched to single coil pickups when I am using my ESP with EMGs. Any thoughts on what settings or parameters I need to tweak to make my solos cut through in the mix and have great sustain? I appreciate any help or ideas anyone has. I am new to the AX8 so please don't beat me up too bad on this...lol
One good musician from my country made an 1-hour duration video showing him creating lead sound with his Axe Fx 2. He used screen capture application, opened the Axe-Edit on the screen and strated to gave explanations simultaneously with fiiling the grid with effect blocks and tweaking those effects.
And, at the very begginig of his explanations, he mentioned, that, according to what he knows from his own experience, some guitar amps DO HAVE thin sound on high notes as the default parameter for them. He also said, that he had had Soldano X88-R preamp, that was custom shop build and was usually assembled only by individual order. Price for the brand new one was about $4000. And even this high-tech piece of equipment tended to sound thin on high notes.
He also assumed, that this problem might occur because of trying to use guitar amplification on bedroom volume - he concentrated on the idea, that maybe amp engineers incorporate certain technical parameters, requirments and optimal techincal condidtions into amps which allow every certain amp model sound its best only when this amp's exploitation conditions meet all of the aforementioned things.
Anyway, his decision was to choose a certain amp model, that initially sounded thick itself. He used Spawn Nitrous amp with Engl Pro 4х12 V30 SM57 cab.
And it was possible to hear all the thickness of resulting sound even before he started to tweak it. He used no GEQ or PEQ by the way, only drive pedal before amp, but it was to make sound even more THICKER.
- link to his video. You can hear examples of the guitar tone at 23:06 - 23:43, 24:57 - 25:07, 29:05 - 29:26. From 39:50 to 42:10 he changes Spawn to Soldano to demonstrate how thinner Soldano sounds and then goes back to Spawn to show all the thickness again. Although you may not be familiar with the language, you can just watch Axe-Edit grid on video and listen to his playing.
So, maybe it will make sense to check different amps and cabs from the list of AX8? Personally I've noticed that cab ALSO AFFECTS A LOT on a structure of sound.
Hope that helps.
