What is it about the Drive sims?

tomc3084

Experienced
I've read many complaints on here about people not liking the drives, and lots of wish threads for them to be updated. I am curious what you guys don't like about them, as they sit now? Just for the hell of it, I pulled out my TS, SD-1, EP Booster, and Fuzz Face and I was able to get them spot on. I know I originally wanted to use my pedals with the Axe FX II, but it was immediately clear to me that the Axe could pull all those tones off and more. So tell me what I am missing, maybe I have ear fatigue, I don't know?
 
I use 3 different drives in my live presets. It wasn't hard to get something really useful.

I did notice that the TS and BB Pre had a mix of 100%, while the real life ones have some clean signal in the mix. Easy to edit that.
Also, the TS defaults to SI diode, instead of 4558/SI.

The defaults sound good, too, just not like the real thing (?)
 
One thing that's so much easier with the AF2 is to use amp distortion. I would assume that a lot of the time with a tube amp most people set their amps a lot cleaner and use various distortion boxes to drive the amps with an immense sense of gratification when you hit a pedal. But since it's so easy in the AF2 to use another scene or preset with a higher gain setting on the amp itself, the effect of hitting the amp with a distortion box as well is somewhat lost and the same sense of gratification is not there, but probably would be if the amp was kept clean? So it's not that the pedal is not sounding the same as in real life, it's just that the effect of using it is different. Just an idea I've had recently. Thoughts?
 
I use multiple drives in front of clean type amps. I have zero complaints about the drives. There is every conceivable option at your fingertips, so I would assume its laziness on the users part to figure it out. I would like the OCD modeled as I think it has a different clip type and maybe the Klon, which has been proven that you can get with what we already have, so...

Back to my original statement. I have zero issues with the drives.

I miss Don peterson, he was somebody that made it his life mission to create representations of every fuzz drive out there. It would be great to find another such soul.

Is there any kind of tools that could be purchased to compare pedals verse the fractal version, so we could create our variations of what already exists? or better yet could we implement a different type of tonematching explicitly for the Drives have it in the Drive block itself as an extra page that we could click on to go through a ala tonematch your own pedal kind of thing. That would be really cool.
 
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I only have one distortion that is included in the axe. Compared, the axe sounds the same, but there's a slight extra nastiness/randomness in the real pedal. Not enough to make me fuzz about it though. Omg, I made a pun!
 
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Originally i had a feeling they were not reacting exactly the same into the amp.. that feeling has sort of gone away now ive learnt to use the axe better. The fact that the signal is purer in the axe might make a tiny difference though.. but im not really sure of the technical side of that tbh. It might explain the "nastiness/randomness" difference aziz noticed?
 
I was disappointed with the drives until I learned to tweak Low/High Cut as Paco mentioned (and a couple of other params). Now, they're > the real thing for me, due to the flexibility. Would love more models, though, of course.
 
The only drive model I can't get to sound "right" to me is the Pi model. Everything else is excellent and I use them all the time. But I can't get the Pi model to sound like my exact triangle muff clone I built. That isn't to say it doesn't sound like a Big Muff; it just doesn't sound like my Big Muff.

And that's most definitely a First World Problem. :)
 
I would love to get more into tweaking the drives and creating drives using EQs and Filters.

But maybe as suggested by another poster above we should also be modifying amp drive through scenes and maybe expression pedals.
 
I'm really digging the OCD blk that was in the Mother of All effects thread. Not sure how accurate it is to the real deal, but it is very nice indeed.
 
The only drive model I can't get to sound "right" to me is the Pi model. Everything else is excellent and I use them all the time. But I can't get the Pi model to sound like my exact triangle muff clone I built. That isn't to say it doesn't sound like a Big Muff; it just doesn't sound like my Big Muff.

And that's most definitely a First World Problem. :)

Same here. Vintage 70's (I think) Big Muff user and I can't get the AxeFx Pi like the original.

But the Pi fuzz in the Fractal is cool in its own rite.
 
I'm trying to relearn using the drives. I never really used pedals, or not in a long time. To get my OD I used channel switching in my BOOGIE so I don't have the recreate the real pedal issue.
 
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