Patch Building Best Practices

Bill-RTP

Bill-RTP

Inspired
Hey all,

I'm curious as to how others are achieving success at building patches, specifically regarding monitoring. As someone who goes completely direct into the board for shows I often find that I'll build something at home, get it sounding great to my ears, and then often have to adjust on the fly pre-show.

At home I play /build through my Event 20/20 BAS studio monitors, and they do a really nice job IMO. I also will build patches using JHAudio IEMs which also sound great to my ears.

Obviously every room is going to be different and I don't really expect a right or wrong here, but would just love to hear what has been working for people.

Thanks!

Bill
 
Someone will be here shortly to describe the Fletcher Munson curve and to recommend dialing in your presets at a certain volume level to help your presets translate better.

that’s probably the first thing to check—how loud are you playing when you’re dialing in your tones on your event monitors?

Edit: another best practice is to add the controls you commonly tweak to your performance pages for easy access. Global EQ can also be used to have those changes apply to everything in the box.
 
Once you get a few patches that work in your intended environment, reference them often while building new ones. Embrace the boxy, small sounding bucketloads of mids, and rule the galaxy when you plug into a million watt stadium PA.
 
Almost all of my presets are using the same template I've built a while ago cause it has all the things I need, so creating a new one is less than 1% of time spent: drives, favorite IRs, compressors and delays are already in place.
Then I add other amps/modules, adjust routing, and go play over a backing track for a while to hear if it's in a ballpark of what I needed. Tuning with broad stroks, like swapping IR, if needed.

And only then - 70% of time I spend building a preset are small adjustments based on the 30% of time I was using this preset with the loud backing tracks. For me it has to sound good with the backing track first, then it makes sense to work on the details. Once I am happy with the details, I go back to backing tracks to see if I nailed it.

Rinse and repeat until done!
 
BDer said:
and then often have to adjust on the fly pre-show
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Who decides what needs to be adjusted, and who decides that you have to adjust? Is it you, is it a soundguy, always the same guy, always someone from the house, can you trust him, etc. Is it always the same things (like always too much bass, too much reverb, etc.)?
 
My approach is 100% based on the philosophy that my job is to make my guitar sound awesome in the mix. So here's my process:
  • Dial in my tone using my studio monitors, with them set at about the same volume level that I'd expect to hear onstage. For me, that's actually not very loud. You can have a normal-volume conversation on our stage without shouting.
  • Reference the sound of the guitar against a recording of the songs (if one exists), or against a song where the guitar has a similar tone. Find something that is a good representation of your live setting, with the same instruments. If you can get your tone to sit nicely in that reference mix, then you're in the ballpark and can adjust once you get together with your bandmates. With each progressive FW update, I have found that I make very few adjustment to the default amp tone settings, and rarely need to apply EQ curves.
  • Because I use IEMs at most shows, I then get familiar with the way my guitar will sound in-ear. This means remembering that I'm not hearing the "amp in the room", and that I'm hearing a studio-quality rendering of my sound. I know that our FOH engineer might apply EQ to adjust my sound for the house mix, and that's OK with me. I know what I want my guitar to sound like AND I trust our engineer to create a good mix. I do check in with them after the gig to find out if they had to make any adjustments, as that might lead me to make changes in my presets. Usually it's pretty minor, and just something to address the room response.
  • I never use a volume pedal onstage. Never. I deliberately don't have a way to adjust my volume from my pedalboard. Once I set my backline volume level during soundcheck, that's it. So there's obviously some preparation for this to work... I use the meters in Axe-Edit to level all my presets and scenes, and then make minor adjustments during rehearsals. Once I have my presets leveled, I don't want to be tempted to turn up onstage over the course of the night. I strongly admonish my bandmates not to turn up either. It's natural to want to do that later in the gig, but we resist that temptation. Getting louder makes your tone seem different (Fletcher Munson blah blah blah) and it often means the musicians play HARDER, which kills dynamics. Also, your FOH will eventually have to participate in the volume arms race, because they are trying to overcome obnoxiously loud stage volume in order to create a viable mix in the room.
Dial in your tone. Get familiar with it in your onstage setting. Fight the urge to crank it up for "feel". Ask the house engineer what you could do to make your tone sit better in their mix. Repeat.
 
One thing I have noticed with a studio monitor is I dial in the tone a bit dark because I am compensating for the brightness of the physical strings. Easier to get the treble right with good headphones.

On the other hand, it’s harder to tell how much bass you are running in headphones. Our perception of bass is as much feeling as it is hearing, so it helps to have the bass moving air through a monitor.
 
giantslayer said:
One thing I have noticed with a studio monitor is I dial in the tone a bit dark because I am compensating for the brightness of the physical strings. Easier to get the treble right with good headphones.

On the other hand, it’s harder to tell how much bass you are running in headphones. Our perception of bass is as much feeling as it is hearing, so it helps to have the bass moving air through a monitor.
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The solution here is to turn up your monitors until you can't hear your strings 🫡🤘
 
I find I always have too much gain, and not enough treble.

I try to dial in with studio monitors at 90db minimum, but it’s always the way. Popping gain and a PEQ high cut on the performance page is a must for me. Just a few tweaks, but they seem to be necessary every gig.
 
I would also add that these days I avoid changing amps. I use a bandmaster for clean because it is VERY NICE, but the Revv orange for everything else, and change tones using a drive pedal. Our gigs tend to have a cleanish set, then a mid-gain brit-pop set, then a hard set, and I find changing amps changes the eq in a jarring way, because my ears have settled on the mid-gain sound. So I just use pedals to increase the nasty without radically altering the sound. But YMMV, many do happily change amps, sometimes even per-song for those patch-per-song people.
 
tysonlt said:
I would also add that these days I avoid changing amps. I use a bandmaster for clean because it is VERY NICE, but the Revv orange for everything else, and change tones using a drive pedal. Our gigs tend to have a cleanish set, then a mid-gain brit-pop set, then a hard set, and I find changing amps changes the eq in a jarring way, because my ears have settled on the mid-gain sound. So I just use pedals to increase the nasty without radically altering the sound. But YMMV, many do happily change amps, sometimes even per-song for those patch-per-song people.
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How much of that change is amp and how much is cab/IR?
 
Unless it's a preset for a specific thing I just use the template preset I have for the Axe 3 or the one for the FM3.

I swap out the amps when I want a change but I'm not creating a preset for every situation I might be in.

Clean, clean w mods, EOB and Over the top.

I also use the same IRs for most everything.
 
Dickie Fredericks said:
Unless it's a preset for a specific thing I just use the template preset I have for the Axe 3 or the one for the FM3.

I swap out the amps when I want a change but I'm not creating a preset for every situation I might be in.

Clean, clean w mods, EOB and Over the top.

I also use the same IRs for most everything.
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Same here on all points
 
tysonlt said:
All amp, I only use one IR.

Perhaps if I changed IR as well that could balance things, but I do NOT want to get involved in that bun-fight.
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Nah, using the same IR is definitely the least change possible. Only way to reduce that change further would be to use the same speaker impedance curve for all your amps. I was a “one IR” guy since the axe fx 2 days and I liked how it kept the tone from changing too drastically for live use, but I would almost never change amps in the middle of a song.

I’m in the process of revamping everything to have different cabs to suit the amp. It is exciting to have new sounds and not being limited only to amps that happened to pair well with my old IR.

One thing I am doing to try to keep the cohesion for live playing is I am only using dynacabs, with the same mic setup: a single ribbon at 20cm. That way, I am limiting the variable to only the cab by taking the mic, mic distance, and mic preamp out as variables. I am optimistic it will work live, but it may be a bit before I can test that.
 
tysonlt said:
I would also add that these days I avoid changing amps. I use a bandmaster for clean because it is VERY NICE, but the Revv orange for everything else, and change tones using a drive pedal. Our gigs tend to have a cleanish set, then a mid-gain brit-pop set, then a hard set, and I find changing amps changes the eq in a jarring way, because my ears have settled on the mid-gain sound. So I just use pedals to increase the nasty without radically altering the sound. But YMMV, many do happily change amps, sometimes even per-song for those patch-per-song people.
Click to expand...
I get the idea of not changing amps too often, but in my case that's less important, because I make them all sound the same anyway, which is its own problem!
 
I tune in what sounds what’s good to my ears….

Then I defuckify it by using high and low cut, turning the bass down because my ears love muddy-shit (just being honest). Lastly, I take whatever gain level I think sounds good and cut that by 20-25% LOL.
 
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