i took the axe ultra out to band practice at church tonight. i also brought the eleven rack as a backup. i have several presets dialed up on the eleven rack that sound great live, so the mission was to get at least that good of a tone, if not pass it up.
first up; the eleven rack with my "my boy blue" preset. very tight and in your face. cuts through the band mix well.
next up the axe ultra; tried about 40-50 presets and everything just sounded compressed and cardboard. kind of all the same, and not very good. something had to be wrong, because in the studio the axe killed! the problem was that i was running the axe-fx 1/4" outs into the eleven rack 1/4" effects return and i was pushing it too hard. why did i have it hooked that way? because i was using the eleven rack for headphones at home.
after changing the hookup to axe-fx 1/4" outs to power amp with 2 passive monitors, and xlr out to mixer through powered monitors i had a better sounding rig.
i ended up using my latest "Faith, Hope, Love" king's x preset. i had to boost some highs and presence while cutting some lows. the amp model was the plexi 2. the guitar was a super strat with humbuckers. the end tone was creamy and much more like a real amp instead of a modeler. at the end of practice i A/B'd the 2 units again and decided to go axe-fx all the way. the only bad thing is that i starting thinking about how much better an axe-fx II might sound. lol.
i'm still going to hold on to the eleven rack as an interface and backup rig though.