Thinking of swapping my FM3 for an HX Stomp

[Will Chen]

no, you can't. The Sansamp is emulating a ampeg SVT

While there is a dedicated SVT pedal, they have a full line of products including the Bass Driver DI and RBI which are solid state analog preamps designed to basically shape your amp in any number of ways to emulate whatever one desires. To truth is...most modern bass amps ESPECIALLY marketed for jazz are aimed at transparency and are high wattage with efficient speakers to increase headroom and minimize distortion. Anything like that in the Fractal world is going to be very, very close to the JC120 just with some minor EQ tweaks, maybe some preamp tweaks. I think a bunch of people would be super happy with a copy the JC120 with a customized tone stack called SS Bass (I can hear folks saying how it sounds just like their GK or Mark Bass rig) and a Sansamp Bass DI model.

 

[Xcdchdchjjf]

Totally agree, I own a Helix, I'm in the market for an FM3 when I have some free cash but anyone thinking the Helix products are crap or sub par are delusional - it's still easily the best unit for the money, and it is used by professional players. I started looking at the fractal stuff thinking it would be night and day difference to the Helix but I was wrong, in reality it's a case of small returns because all the top units are obviously very good now. I still believe the fractal units are probably the best (although quad cortex is getting interesting), but to suggest by comparison, Helix products are just toys, is the same rubbish as you see on the Line 6 forum when they are very dismissive of Fractal products.

I tend to conisder metallica and john mayer and U2 on another level of professional.
Tose bigger two bands there have multi million dollar shows riding on their gear.

They use Fractal to my knowledge......................

 

[Deleted member 55227]

While there is a dedicated SVT pedal, they have a full line of products including the Bass Driver DI and RBI which are solid state analog preamps designed to basically shape your amp in any number of ways to emulate whatever one desires. To truth is...most modern bass amps ESPECIALLY marketed for jazz are aimed at transparency and are high wattage with efficient speakers to increase headroom and minimize distortion. Anything like that in the Fractal world is going to be very, very close to the JC120 just with some minor EQ tweaks, maybe some preamp tweaks. I think a bunch of people would be super happy with a copy the JC120 with a customized tone stack called SS Bass (I can hear folks saying how it sounds just like their GK or Mark Bass rig) and a Sansamp Bass DI model.

Look, again - I work with amplifiers day in day out. I repair tons of ss bass amps too - EBS, MarkBass, TraceElliot, Glockenklang, Gallien Krueger, Eden, plus all the guitar amps stuff, even Trainwrecks and Dumbles (the real ones, not clones) - my experience with amp concepts goes very far and the reason why I'm back on the FAS route after 5 years of silence (when I sold my AF2 Mk2) was just because I needed a silent reference to test my hv tube pedal designs with as many amps I can..... silent, in my design lab in the upper floor.....

So here I am - and the JC120 is not a reference, it's more of a needed additional to the line up, because most people need this guitar amp in the collection. It is far more similar to the guitar (tube) amp topology than a modern bass amp such as the EBS HD350 for example (which I had fixed last week). There is no cathode follower (hot saturator) needed in the JC120, neither is all the bias excursion stuff, because there is no such thing like "grid current" in solid state components - for instance even on Mosfets there is no gate current, and if there is - it is a very small leakage current called IGSS (Gate Source Leakage) but this is not close to what FAS modeled to work for guitar tube amps. There are workarounds to mimic the behavior - for instance - solid state power amps have a very high damping factor (this is the ratio between output impedance and load impedance), so they wont "see" the complex load aka impedance curve as a tube amp with much lower damping factor will do - a tube amp reacts like an almost ideal current amplifier, the voltage is very load dependent - so is the clipping behavior of a overdriven tube guitar (or bass) amp - some amps have tubes with higher or lower output resistance, which affects the sonic behavior because they will "react" differently to the load impedance curve - that's why we often say tubes have sound (they don't......Cliff once said that too in the past). To mimic this unique behavior on a solid state amp, we need a current feedback loop....often done with a small resistor in series with the load, which creates a voltage that is send back to the power amp input so the amplifier will react to the the complex load of a speaker cabinet. But modern solid state bass amps often don't have these "current feedback" loops, because the load/impedance curve behavior is not important for their tone shaping......

 

[Will Chen]

Look, again - I work with amplifiers day in day out. I repair tons of ss bass amps too - EBS, MarkBass, TraceElliot, Glockenklang, Gallien Krueger, Eden, plus all the guitar amps stuff, even Trainwrecks and Dumbles (the real ones, not clones) - my experience with amp concepts goes very far and the reason why I'm back on the FAS route after 5 years of silence (when I sold my AF2 Mk2) was just because I needed a silent reference to test my hv tube pedal designs with as many amps I can..... silent, in my design lab in the upper floor.....

So here I am - and the JC120 is not a reference, it's more of a needed additional to the line up, because most people need this guitar amp in the collection. It is far more similar to the guitar (tube) amp topology than a modern bass amp such as the EBS HD350 for example (which I had fixed last week). There is no cathode follower (hot saturator) needed in the JC120, neither is all the bias excursion stuff, because there is no such thing like "grid current" in solid state components - for instance even on Mosfets there is no gate current, and if there is - it is a very small leakage current called IGSS (Gate Source Leakage) but this is not close to what FAS modeled to work for guitar tube amps. There are workarounds to mimic the behavior - for instance - solid state power amps have a very high damping factor (this is the ratio between output impedance and load impedance), so they wont "see" the complex load aka impedance curve as a tube amp with much lower damping factor will do - a tube amp reacts like an almost ideal current amplifier, the voltage is very load dependent - so is the clipping behavior of a overdriven tube guitar (or bass) amp - some amps have tubes with higher or lower output resistance, which affects the sonic behavior because they will "react" differently to the load impedance curve - that's why we often say tubes have sound (they don't......Cliff once said that too in the past). To mimic this unique behavior on a solid state amp, we need a current feedback loop....often done with a small resistor in series with the load, which creates a voltage that is send back to the power amp input so the amplifier will react to the the complex load of a speaker cabinet. But modern solid state bass amps often don't have these "current feedback" loops, because the load/impedance curve behavior is not important for their tone shaping......

The JC120 is a SS amp. Now...maybe it's a huge compromise in the way it has been implemented by Fractal more or less trying to un-tube their tube amp engine and in that case perhaps we've ironically uncovered one of the least accurate Fractal amp models. Isn't everything you said about SS amps also relevant to the JC120 which is a solid state amp? I know it's not a pure "reference" amp, but it is a SS amp emulation within Fractal devices which means we can swap out the tone stack for a bass equivalent load up a bass cab IR (or no IR at all) and essentially have a SS bass amp.

Now if we want to go full blown 100% transparent...that's when, since we're in a virtual setting, we remove the preamp all together and use a graphic or parametric EQ along with a compressor (or even multiband compression) and you have the most transparent bass amp one can possibly have.

 

[ElectricPhase]

Who’d have ever thought there’d be complaining about an emulation being too tube-like.

 

[Deleted member 55227]

The JC120 is a SS amp. Now...maybe it's a huge compromise in the way it has been implemented by Fractal more or less trying to un-tube their tube amp engine and in that case perhaps we've ironically uncovered one of the least accurate Fractal amp models. Isn't everything you said about SS amps also relevant to the JC120 which is a solid state amp? I know it's not a pure "reference" amp, but it is a SS amp emulation within Fractal devices which means we can swap out the tone stack for a bass equivalent load up a bass cab IR (or no IR at all) and essentially have a SS bass amp.

Now if we want to go full blown 100% transparent...that's when, since we're in a virtual setting, we remove the preamp all together and use a graphic or parametric EQ along with a compressor (or even multiband compression) and you have the most transparent bass amp one can possibly have.

Read my posts before, before telling me stuff I know for a very long time

 

[DavidCarrMusic]

I love the FM3 but the lack of a SS bass amp head is a bit of a disappointment. I play mostly jazz ala janek gwizdala, matt garrison, tony grey, etc. Janek is using the hx stomp. The hxstomp has over 10 bass amps. The fractal has 2 and none of them work for me. I've been using a JC120 and the 8 band output EQ for a bass amp and it's not horrible but also not ideal.

Just wondering what others have found to be successful?

[edit] - @Postretro has been helping me dial in the JC120 to be more like a bass amp. The bass parts on this were recorded using his preset so at this point, the thread is obsolete because I'm now getting very good results with the FM3 for bass.

Apologies if I've missed a similar comment in the previous pages but have you de-selected the power amp modelling? Since bass amps are optimised for clean tones (99% of the time) I would think a modern Bass amp model like the Mesa (definately not a bassman) or the SVT with the power stage off will give you all the tone shaping capabilities you would ever need.
I've built my own bass presets and combined a dirty and clean path. With the style your playing, wouldn't EQ and compression with no cab model be enough?
Nice playing

 

[Paulzx]

I tend to conisder metallica and john mayer and U2 on another level of professional.
Tose bigger two bands there have multi million dollar shows riding on their gear.

They use Fractal to my knowledge......................

I agree, and that is a big draw for Fractal, but even then, some of the Axe III artists are only using the effects, not the modelling. In fact if you look at at a lot of the major acts, they're all using something different. Line 6 doesn't have anywhere near as high profile acts endorsing the Helix admittedly, although Evanescence uses Helix so it can't be said that the Helix is not usable in a professional environment.