Hi all,
I've got the XL+ for a week now and the more I dig in it the more disappointed I get.....
I hear about many people who got this first impression and changed it eventually.....1 year later. Somehow spending one year tweaking to get a just decent tone doesn't sound worth 2 grand so maybe some of you can understand the frustration...
Basically I need a simple amp + cab setting. I don't use many effects as they're not my main concern. With me if the raw amp tone isn't good nothing added above will help (except EQ which is anyway included in both amp and cab blocks).
I want a bright semi-crunch rhythm tone. The kind you can change from clean to drive just by picking harder. I LIKE it fizzy, with a lot of top-end and a bit of warm bass, but not too punchy.
So far the starting presets sound boomy and overcompressed. Brightening them up is a pain without loosing dynamics. I'm using a Gibson SG with Lindy Fralin pickups. I tried some stratocasters at a friend who has the ax-8, it's not quite as muffled but still far from what I want.
I tried global eq, low and hi-cut knobs on both amp and cab, bright switch is almost always on around 1-2k uF (to bring the sound from the other room to the one I'm in). Changing the mic proximity from zero only makes the sound more muffled to my ears.
So far the best tone I got out of it was close to a 5-watt combo I have (through it's speaker, not the PA). The worst part is it doesn't seem to track my pick attack correctly, like there's a bit of delay and the sound "swells" in instead of being sharp. This felt the same through the guitar cab. It also sounds like I'm hitting a wooden plank.
I'm not a tone purist, I've been playing a Wampler pedal with a Parametric EQ through a Mooer Baby Bomb for the past year (due to easier lugging around). It's not quite a cheap digital processor but it's far from any real amp. And still more usable than the Axe so far, it's a bad tone with plenty of dynamics and presence as opposed to a muffled bad tone with almost no dynamics.
So, what am I missing here? Do i need to know by heart every button in the axe-edit to get a decent tone, like there's a latency parameter or a "remove blanket off speaker" switch? Or do I really need to switch to full analogue and break my back to get what should be an ordinary crunch tone?
I've got the XL+ for a week now and the more I dig in it the more disappointed I get.....
I hear about many people who got this first impression and changed it eventually.....1 year later. Somehow spending one year tweaking to get a just decent tone doesn't sound worth 2 grand so maybe some of you can understand the frustration...
Basically I need a simple amp + cab setting. I don't use many effects as they're not my main concern. With me if the raw amp tone isn't good nothing added above will help (except EQ which is anyway included in both amp and cab blocks).
I want a bright semi-crunch rhythm tone. The kind you can change from clean to drive just by picking harder. I LIKE it fizzy, with a lot of top-end and a bit of warm bass, but not too punchy.
So far the starting presets sound boomy and overcompressed. Brightening them up is a pain without loosing dynamics. I'm using a Gibson SG with Lindy Fralin pickups. I tried some stratocasters at a friend who has the ax-8, it's not quite as muffled but still far from what I want.
I tried global eq, low and hi-cut knobs on both amp and cab, bright switch is almost always on around 1-2k uF (to bring the sound from the other room to the one I'm in). Changing the mic proximity from zero only makes the sound more muffled to my ears.
So far the best tone I got out of it was close to a 5-watt combo I have (through it's speaker, not the PA). The worst part is it doesn't seem to track my pick attack correctly, like there's a bit of delay and the sound "swells" in instead of being sharp. This felt the same through the guitar cab. It also sounds like I'm hitting a wooden plank.
I'm not a tone purist, I've been playing a Wampler pedal with a Parametric EQ through a Mooer Baby Bomb for the past year (due to easier lugging around). It's not quite a cheap digital processor but it's far from any real amp. And still more usable than the Axe so far, it's a bad tone with plenty of dynamics and presence as opposed to a muffled bad tone with almost no dynamics.
So, what am I missing here? Do i need to know by heart every button in the axe-edit to get a decent tone, like there's a latency parameter or a "remove blanket off speaker" switch? Or do I really need to switch to full analogue and break my back to get what should be an ordinary crunch tone?