STL Tones Axe-Fx Packs?

Hi All -

I'm a big fan of Andy James and noticed that STL Tones has a bunch of AXE FX packs on sale - including an Andy James pack. Does anyone have any experience with the AXE FX packs from STL Tones? $25 (which is half price now) is still pretty expensive for an amp pack of this size. They also state that they are not compatible with FW 12.x+ so that kind of seems like a deal breaker.

Anyway, wanted to see if anyone has used their packs and could share their experience.

Thanks!
 
My experience was not good with them. The first pack I bought I really liked, so I bought another that was pretty expensive as well. At the time I purchased, they did not have listed on the site that they did not support newer firmware. Others on this board in another post confirmed this with theirs as well on the cached copies of STL's site online. STL basically said suck it. We're keeping your $100. Whatever process they do to create presets will not translate up in the firmware and you're left with a flubby sounding, low gain patch, that sounds nothing like the presets on their site. The previous pack I had bought suffered the same fate as I continued upgrading fw, when they had worked previously. Don't get caught up on the demos. The presets will not sound like that on updated firmware. So I guess they're just trying to find suckers who they can charge $25 a pop for non-working presets and since you've been warned you have no recourse. That really is a sorry way to treat customers.
 
Same experience here. Their presets are initially made for Kemper I think and the packs I've tried 'on the dark side' are actually pretty good to be fair. Then at some point they did make the effort to port them to the Axe-Fx II, and a few packs were actually decent-sounding. But now they are selling these same packs, simply converted to the III (probably using FracTool) and selling them like that...
 
I had the same experience with the Andy James STL Tone pack. Easy installation but unusable tones so it wasn’t worth the $25.00 to me. I didn’t even learn that much from checking out the patch construction with sometimes gives me ideas for my own patch builds.
 
I’m considering the Austin Buddy Dream Rigs for my XL+, I’ll search the forum for a thread too but does anyone recommend this over the STL Tones?

I have no problem resetting my AxeFx. I have one Zakk Wylde patch that I created but the more I play through it the more I dislike the tones in a mix. Very effect heavy which I tend to do when creating my own stuff.

I think I try to fill up the entire EQ range with sound and my patches sound better solo than in a mix.

I might backup what I have now and start from scratch with the Dream Rigs download. Thoughts?
 
I had the same experience with STL and Andy James preset. Sounds like garbage. Was very excited and wasn’t cheap either.

Part of the problem is they don’t seem to update for changes in firmware. The Andy James being sold is based on quite old firmware (confirmed via email with them but can’t remember the old firmware version off the top of my head).
 
I have some from AB and Moke - MF has some I would like to try at some point. Though I think it's good if they can adjust for firmware, I do wonder, at what point the work involved with keeping them going on new firmwares becomes more than it's worth to sell them initially - it seems like a labour of love for some of the patch builders as I can't see how anyone is getting rich given how long it takes me to rebalance my few dozen self built patches when needed - I can't imagine the effort required to rejig 1000s of them (i.e. like in the AB packs).
 
I bought the Lasse Lammert STLtones pack on sale a while back - probably before firmware 10. I really like some of the cabs in there WAY more than the stock cabs, and the Driftwood Purple Nightmare & Mesa Dual Rec rev F presets sound better than my real heads. I sold the Driftwood and Mesa shortly afterwards and haven't noticed any shift in preset sound over firmware changes... except that everything just keeps sounding better!

Pretty sure when they say "not supported above FW 12" they mean "no updates" as opposed to "it won't work anymore"
 
Oh it won't if you add the IRs and patches AFTER the fw upgrade. Why do you think STL posted the disclaimer? Everyone other than you in this thread seems to be having the issue. Try removing the patches and IRs, from your AFX3 and add them back. Easy enough to do and maybe with the newest firmware, it's no longer an issue. Isn't working for me so maybe you could do us all a favor and test? ;)
 
Oh it won't if you add the IRs and patches AFTER the fw upgrade. Why do you think STL posted the disclaimer? Everyone other than you in this thread seems to be having the issue. Try removing the patches and IRs, from your AFX3 and add them back. Easy enough to do and maybe with the newest firmware, it's no longer an issue. Isn't working for me so maybe you could do us all a favor and test? ;)
Do you really even own these presets? I already did what you're asking with FW13 and once again after that. What are you guys doing wrong? You need to tune new variables accordingly that get introduced with new FW packs to accommodate your sound, just like with speaker impedance etc a bunch of revs back.

With the immense wealth of everything we have available to tweak in the AXF3, if it sounds like crap it's your fault. I don't buy stuff to get infinite updates and be hand-held in perpetuity.
 
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Hey guys, I also had a bad experience with STL tones. I used their plugins for a while and when I purchased my Axe fx III, I thought it would be great to get their packs. But just one word - Disappointed.
I purchased the Andy James pack but it doesn't sound as good as on their website. But the AJ plugin sounds pretty good (In my opinion). Then, I purchase another pack and it was not working at all on Axe FXIII. They tested it and realised there was an issue. So they reimbursed me.

Their packs are quite expensive and I ended up not using them. To me this is a waste a money, because I found different commercial packs cheaper and way better.
 
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