The Ultimate Amp Tweak Guide: "ML Method"

I'm neither an amp builder or tweaker. I found decent presets years ago that have served well. After recent firmware updates I thought I would once again experiment so I created a preset with Mr. Z and cab 58 that Cliff recommended. I threw in some effects that I liked from some of my other presets.

Last night I watched your vid and used it to dial in the preset. This is the first preset I have created that isn't going to get the delete button. Sounds great with an absolute perfect blend of crunch and clean. Thank you for this insight.
 
I tried this method last night and I thought the sound was pretty crappy. I'm not sure if that's just because I didn't follow it correctly or because a guitar tone for recording will not sound as "full" as a "bedroom guitar" (from the video) sound.

I hope its the latter. I didn't get a chance to test record anything after trying this idea last night. I will give it another shot and record my results. Because I do know that full, thick sounding guitars by themselves have often ended up sounding really bad when I record them. I'm still trying to nail down how to record guitars that sound decent in a mix. It seems so counterintuitive :)
 
Works for me...nice explanation...I'm not too much on the amp tweaking, usually I try to find the tone that I need and that's all but with this video I really understand why sometimes I can't get that "balance"... THANKS A LOT!!!
 
I'm neither an amp builder or tweaker. I found decent presets years ago that have served well. After recent firmware updates I thought I would once again experiment so I created a preset with Mr. Z and cab 58 that Cliff recommended. I threw in some effects that I liked from some of my other presets.

Last night I watched your vid and used it to dial in the preset. This is the first preset I have created that isn't going to get the delete button. Sounds great with an absolute perfect blend of crunch and clean. Thank you for this insight.
That's awesome! I really haven't heard back from people about if this method worked for them or not so this is great news. :)
 
I tried this method last night and I thought the sound was pretty crappy. I'm not sure if that's just because I didn't follow it correctly or because a guitar tone for recording will not sound as "full" as a "bedroom guitar" (from the video) sound.

I hope its the latter. I didn't get a chance to test record anything after trying this idea last night. I will give it another shot and record my results. Because I do know that full, thick sounding guitars by themselves have often ended up sounding really bad when I record them. I'm still trying to nail down how to record guitars that sound decent in a mix. It seems so counterintuitive :)
It could be one or the other. Obviously if you never plan to use that guitar tone in a mix or with a band then getting a super neutral response may not be a top priority. There are guitar tones out there that are nowhere near neutral like Pantera and some of the Metallica albums... then again IMO the best Metallica sounds are very neutral. F.ex. Black Album, Hardwired, St.Anger are all neutral.

Also once you're used to a certain EQ balance you will think of that sound as "normal" and everything else is "too muffled" or "too bright". Do not always trust your ears. It's good to have a stem guitar sound that you can use for reference from time to time like a favorite guitar intro. One of the reference sounds that works for me is the "John Petrucci - Jaws Of Life" intro. It works for me because Petrucci is using a 7-string for that song and I'm tuned to C most of the time so it's somewhat comparable EQ-wise. Just listen to that mix as a point of reference as well. Probably one of the most balanced mixes out there and you hear everything equally well: kick, bass, snare, guitar, overheads and the smooth guitar leads still cut through.
 
So Since I noticed you are using 7.02 I am curious, where did you have the motor drive settings, which one of them did you use, amp block, or cab block? or did you not use it at all in these presets?
 
So Since I noticed you are using 7.02 I am curious, where did you have the motor drive settings, which one of them did you use, amp block, or cab block? or did you not use it at all in these presets?
I didn't touch it for this video. I actually haven't gotten around to play with that function yet.
 
Right now all of my guitars are setup just the way I like them and I tweak them.....Thank you for the concern though! My guitar went a little bit out of tune when I raised it up on my knee and the tremolo bar got stuck in my pants... or maybe I wasn't wearing pants. Muhahaa!! ;)

Sorry Mikko- I was more pointing out the guitar setup thing as something you might mention up front as advice to anyone watching this video as a tutorial. I figured you already had your guitars dialed in pretty well, but thought to mention this more for others who might be watching this and are less experienced.
 
I'm always having issues with bottom end being too boomy and top being too harsh. I turn the bass to 1.5, depth off, adjust EQ, tried EQ in front, always too much bass. If I lower too much it get lifeless. For lowering harshness, I've turned the bright switch off, presence lower, brightness knob lower. Just about when it is sounding better, it gets muffled like a blanket over the speakers or it gets honky. Lowering 1 to 2k gets rid of the honk but it's lifeless again.
Just today I played with supertweed. It sounded great in my in-ears, but terrible in the FOH. It was too middy and muffled. I'm going to try your method, thanks.
 
I'm really enjoying this method, Mikko. I had my method for creating patches tailored to my different guitars, but the problem was that each patch sounded nice, but only with that one guitar with which I made it.

Using your method, I have patches now that sound great with most, if not all my guitars.

In the past, I used several advanced parameters too often, so many firmware updates would change the algorithms for those parameters, while BMT never really changed that much through the many updates.

I then got really into the passive filters in the cab block, but if I started there, I'd never get BMT right.

I'm having even more success when I crank the Input gain all the way to 10, adjust BMT, then dial back to the amount of gain I want, per your suggestion.
 
I guess this method is working very well for me :) I'll have to see in other environments, if my current sound really works, right now I'm limited to using my headphones (no Beats or any of that crap, it's a Beyerdynamic DT 770 PRO).

I always had trouble dialing in sounds that are too bright. To avoid that I thought I could give this method a try and see how dominant the highs are. Oh hell they were VERY dominant! So I used your method on my higain, midgain and clean tone. After that switching between the three is very smooth. I like it a lot!!! I got to settings I probably otherwise wouldn't have dialed in.

So I can recommend this method for all kinds of tones :)
 
Hey Beyerdynamic headphones are really good. I trust the 880 Pros a lot. ;)

It makes me really happy to see people getting good result with this method! Remember that you don't have to be 100% neutral but if you want to get the best results be sure that you have neutral monitoring like FRFR f.ex. :)
 
Yeah the 880 Pro is great, I just wanted to have a closed headphone. The 770 Pro was the best I could find for my price max of ~150€.

I won't stay 100% neutral, I always tend to have more mids, because that's where the guitar has to sit in a mix. Right now I'm very neutral and I'll adjust it once I play over my 4x12 and through a PA system.


Yesterday I broke one of my quite old strings, so I replaced them. Now my guitar of course sounds quite different, so I had to correct the settings. It's interesting that there wasn't really much to correct, the eq settings only had to be changed +-1. What's really interesting: I had to give the treble a +1 for new strings! I would have thought that they are brighter, so I'd rather have to -1 the treble. I guess it's because the lower strings lose more overtones when they get older compared to the higher strings, so I had to adjust this mostly for the lower strings.


And one question about your method: Do you think it's better to do it with headphones or with speakers? With headphones you don't get feedback, with speakers you do. This will produce different results I guess.
 
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I didn't use this method to make any patches, but one thing you said stuck in my mind when I watched the video, that you tend to turn the depth to 0 on amps.

Today, after flipping through a bunch of random amps, which I tend to do when I'm bored, my main patch didn't quite sound right, had some strange quality I couldn't really put my finger on (ear fatigue probably playing a part there). Sounds fine on fresh ears after not playing guitar for an hour or so though.

I tried doing what you do, pulled resonance down to 0 (it was at around 5, which most of my non-recto patches seem to be) and after some minor eq tweaks, it does sound much better, and that strange characteristic was gone - which apparently was just too much sub bass rumbling.

Depth is just one of those things I've always turned up on amps since I like a nice chunky palm mute. I love those 'breakthrough' moments where you figure out a new way to do things.
 
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