Watch the input level, or how I made to stock preset sound good!

Johan Allard

Johan Allard

Power User
I’ve had a bit of an epiphany just recently. I was watching Scott Peterson’s video about Cab Resonance frequency. At the end of the video Scott resets the Double Verb amp and with his humbucker (presumably his PRS) guitar he has very slight driven sound, and he adjusts the Input Trim to 0.75 and it’s clean as a whistle. I looked at that and thought, hang on, there’s no way that at 0.75 Input Trim the Double Verb is clean with my guitar so I started thinking, now remembering a post earlier where Adam pointed out that the factory preset Fender presets are completely clean with a single-coil and only slightly overdriven with humbuckers. Again, with my guitars the stock Fender presets are all quite driven by default.

First, I’m pretty sure I’ve set everything up correctly. I’m running the latest 12.04beta, I’ve adjusted the input in the I/O menu so that it just tickles the red led’s when hitting the strings hard.

What I’ve ended up doing is to set the global noise gate level at -8dB. At this level I get very similar result to Scott in his video. Now, I don’t know if it’s something with my pickups, my strings, a hidden boost in my cable, the way my guitar resonates with my belly, that I’m a scorpio or live in Australia, no idea. But at -8dB I seem to have similar actual input levels to what Scott has in his video.

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Now low and behold - everything started to sound better. Not only better but actually really good. All the stock presets make sense now, just changing the input gate to my global gate value with -8dB level. I’m sure some of you think at this point that “why don’t you adjust by ear” but the problem is that most of these amps I’ve never heard in real life and have no idea what they should sound like. So I’m trusting that Fractal have provided decent defaults, and with this single adjustment, it now feels like they have. Fender cleans are clean, the AC30 Top Boost is slightly driven and chimey, and Mark Day’s HBE is still face melting. And the good thing is even the high gain sound better now. Tighter.

I can only conclude that it has literally been like I’ve had an 8dB boost pedal always on into my AF2. And I’ve constantly having to fight that when dialling in a tone.

So, if you like me didn't think that the stock presets sounded any good. Do the same simple test as I did. Dial up the default Double Verb amp and reset it to it’s default values. Adjust the input trim to 0.75 if you’re running humbuckers. If this is not clean as in Scotts Cab Resonance video, you like me are having something going on with your guitar(s) that give too much input, and dialling that back will likely improve things for you as well. I have no idea if the opposite is also a problem, or how to test it if it is.

Enjoy!
 
This is the same as turning amp input trim down more, BTW, unless you have other nonlinear blocks like drive before amp. If you tend to make the same adjustments to all presets you could use the global amp gain parameter instead.
 
Well, considering Cliff’s post the other day about the difference between Drive and Input Trim. Wouldn’t global amp gain affect the treble as the Drive does on most amps? I did think about this as well.
 
Ok, even better. I’ve tried now and it does seem to give the exact same effect. So the updated recommendation is then:

If you’re having troubles with the built-in presets. Begin with a preset that is known to be supposed to be clean, like the Factory Double Verb preset. If that is coming out with more than just a little bit of drive, adjust the Global -> Amp Gain parameter down until it’s clean, or if you’re running humbuckers, adjust the Input Trim of the preset to 0.75 and adjust until it’s clean. That way you will have a similar overall gain level as what the presets was created with.
 
To clarify: global amp gain & input trim adjust level at the same point, input of amp block before any amp block processing. So you can just turn global amp gain down more instead of adding the step of setting input trim to 0.75 or some other value per preset, unless you reach minimum and still want to lower input level.
 
The point of using input trim of 0.75 was to match what I saw Scott Peterson do on his humbucker guitar! and also align with what Adam has said that clean presets are dialed to be clean with single coil guitar and that a humbucker will break up slightly. Breaking up slightly is hard to dial in, so by setting the input trim slightly lower it is easier to match on a humbucker guitar with what is the stated as the way the presets have been dialed in.
 
And of course, if you want your humbucker guitar to match the levels typical of a single coil, you can just keep lowering the global amp gain until it's clean with the defaults on a clean preset, like the Double Verb.

There are a few points of this exercise. One is to get the factory presets to sound closer to the way they where intended. By doing this I pretty much find all of them sounding good, or at least that I can understand the point of them even if Das metal probably never will be really useful to me. Another one is to get the default amp sounds closer to how Cliff has modelled them. Like in my case, before it was like having a 8dB boost pedal in front of every amp and now the default feels much better just selecting any amp with it’s default setting.
 
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