Why are so many people not relying on their ears anymore?

I've always relied on my ears as the final say. When I dial in a tone, it's dependent on so many things... the gear, the room/space, the application band/studio/bedroom, and of course the genre or mood.

This can only come from experience in doing all these things and learning what works and what does not (for you, not for everyone)

That said, and while I love Fractals modeling, what my ears get from a "live" particular tube amp and particular cabinet with particular 12" guitar speakers, is with out a doubt (for me) not possible to model/emulate/capture.

This is the beauty of it all imo, as my ears are not your ears.
 
What I read often, and find disheartening, is someone posting looking for knowledge / insight with specific questions about how a given tonal mechanism works and invariably getting the nevermind how/why "just use your ears / set it to what sounds good" responses😡
 
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sprint said:
What I read often, and find disheartening, is someone posting looking for knowledge / insight with specific questions about how a given tonal mechanism works and invariably getting the nevermind how/why "just use your ears / set it to what sounds good" responses😡
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In the same vein as "RTFM" responses.

Why bother responding at all if your answer is going to be a dismissive command? Does it make you feel superior, somehow, to the person asking the question?
 
Joe Bfstplk said:
In the same vein as "RTFM" responses.

Why bother responding at all if your answer is going to be a dismissive command? Does it make you feel superior, somehow, to the person asking the question?
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yes - and though there are questions that appear where the person asking has not done some needed listening or manual reading, once it's established that was done, then "just use your ears" is not helpful. Just a pet peeve of mine I guess: like when I'm looking for an answer to a specific technical issue of any kind anywhere and have to scroll thorough pages and pages of "I have the same problem!" to find the one post that has a material answer in it lol!
 
There's numerous reasons.

With the Fractal... most likely option anxiety, and with all the available parameters that come with that... the morbid curiosity to play with them, even if they have no idea what they do. Because they read somewhere or believe it may contain the holy grail and they will instantly become a guitar ninja, because their tone now contains that magical mystical thing called 'mojo'.

They second guess themselves... thinking they have a decent ear (or the opposite)... add to that the placebo effect. Possible result... listening with their eyes.

They have no idea what they really want to hear. But they'll know when they hear it.
 
Joe Bfstplk said:
In the same vein as "RTFM" responses.

Why bother responding at all if your answer is going to be a dismissive command? Does it make you feel superior, somehow, to the person asking the question?
Click to expand...
I understand that...

"What I read often, and find disheartening, is someone posting looking for knowledge / insight with specific questions about how a given tonal mechanism works and invariably getting the nevermind how/why "just use your ears / set it to what sounds good" responses😡"

... can be disheartening at times. But part of the problem here is that there are often many layers of knowledge that are necessary to fully comprehend how certain mechanisms work. One thing that is not really stated enough here on this forum (as far as I am concerned) is that it is very easy to hit the wall in dealing with the AxeFx products without having a pretty good understanding of how (in particular) tube amplifiers actually work and how their somewhat different designs exploit the fundamentals of the mechanisms involved.

I'm not just talking about how to turn the different knobs on an amplifier. I'm talking more about the fundamentals...

...how transformers work, how linear power supplies work, how inductors and capacitors work in different ways for different purposes in amplifiers in relation to the other components in common audio circuit topologies, how resistors are used in various ways, how basic filters work, how both negative and positive feedback (stability and oscillation topics) works within those topologies, what the real difference is between Class A and Class AB power topologies, how impedance matching devices work such as output transformers, how speaker motors work, what the difference is between voltage amplification and power amplification, how tubes, both preamp and power tubes work and how they are biased in different ways and what that even means, what triode, pentode, and ultra-linear operation is, how the circuits in your guitar are interfaced to the amplifier yada, yada, yada... There are lots of good books and net based learning tools for this.

The point is that if you don't understand the fundamentals of all these things it becomes increasingly difficult to describe some of the mechanisms in the AxeFx that attempt to model and provide (often extra) control over many of these parameters. And this doesn't even yet address the whole world of effects and how the fundamentals of their designs interface to the amplification signal paths.

So when someone puts you off with a short answer and to use your ear, please try to understand that they may simply be saying that you may need to do a little (or a lot) of homework to really makes sense of an answer that might otherwise get very involved in the necessary fundamentals to adequately describe a given mechanism. Often this does require that your ear is also trained to discern the difference among many different fundamental audio mechanisms so that you can learn to predict what some abstract circuit definition might sound like as fundamental mechanisms are piled on top of each other in the overall signal path that you are working with. Hope that helps? Maybe?
 
jrayjr said:
the latter
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Ah, ok. In that case it depends on the parameter. . I like to know what "standard operation" is so if I deviate and something is off or sounds awful I'll know where to look and why. Using myself as a recent example, I asked about speaker drive and poweramp/cab setup. The new speaker drive setting may sound "wrong" when I use my poweramp/cab setup and I may be scratching my head wondering why my new presets sound bad compared to my old ones. I could "use my ears" so to speak, or just skip that entirely if I know that its not best practice to use it with a poweramp/cab setup. Just like its not best practice to use cab sims through a real cab. Some people do use cab sims with a poweramp/cab, and make it work, but its probably a hell of a time to get that unconventional setting to work when it could have been avoided by knowing the "best practice." Before I think outside of the box I like to know what's in the box first.

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sprint said:
yes - and though there are questions that appear where the person asking has not done some needed listening or manual reading, once it's established that was done, then "just use your ears" is not helpful. Just a pet peeve of mine I guess: like when I'm looking for an answer to a specific technical issue of any kind anywhere and have to scroll through pages and pages of "I have the same problem!" to find the one post that has a material answer in it lol!
Click to expand...
On Stack Overflow, which is extremely technologically oriented, the rules for posting are along these lines:
  1. Describe where you searched/what you read in an attempt to solve the problem.
  2. Describe why those didn’t help.
  3. Describe what code you wrote prior to asking.
  4. Describe why it didn’t work.
  5. Summarize your code to the minimum necessary to reproduce the problem. Make sure that the necessary code is all contained in the question so we can reproduce it separately and work on it to find a solution.
The goal is to encourage people to take the necessary steps upfront to try to solve the problem by educating themselves, then attempting to write a working solution based on their self-education.

Does it work? Kinda. Most people initially ignore it, then their question gets rejected by their peers and they’re forced to fill in the missing information and then their peers vote to reopen the question. Sometimes it’s a cycle that occurs multiple times. Sometimes their peers, trying to help, pile on like puppies and immediately switch to “20 questions mode” and multiple people ask multiple different questions without a clue how to diagnose the problem in an organized manner, and it goes on and on. And sometimes someone recognizes the problem and immediately says “Read this question and its answer”, i.e., “RTFM on page n” and that’s the end of it. Which, if the person asking had done that at the onset, would have circumvented a lot of wasted time and energy and frustration.

Both sites require certain things from the user asking the question, only that site explains how to ask in an organized manner and has a tutorial explaining how it all works. (And of course people ignore that, and then get told to do their ground work.) Observing that site from the inside for years has been an interesting learning experience watching how some people understand how to educate themselves and need a gentle nudge or explanation and then they are off and running again, and others want it done for them and handed to them with a bow on a platter.

And I see the same strata and situations here.

Each step has its parallels here. It helps immensely if people RTFM first and can quote what they tried so we don’t have to ask. If we know they already read it we can skip suggesting they do so, and we don’t have to quote it, or summarize it … the line… process… moves much more quickly. If there’s the preset, or block, attached, we can immediately look inside and try to reproduce the problem and find a fix.

If we can get rid of those “ifs” the process of Q&A will be smoother. But the first step won’t happen so we’re always going to be stuck with the same issues.

That’s how I see it from my porch.
 
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sprint said:
yes - and though there are questions that appear where the person asking has not done some needed listening or manual reading, once it's established that was done, then "just use your ears" is not helpful. Just a pet peeve of mine I guess: like when I'm looking for an answer to a specific technical issue of any kind anywhere and have to scroll thorough pages and pages of "I have the same problem!" to find the one post that has a material answer in it lol!
Click to expand...

tealtonerick said:
I understand that...

"What I read often, and find disheartening, is someone posting looking for knowledge / insight with specific questions about how a given tonal mechanism works and invariably getting the nevermind how/why "just use your ears / set it to what sounds good" responses😡"

... can be disheartening at times. But part of the problem here is that there are often many layers of knowledge that are necessary to fully comprehend how certain mechanisms work. One thing that is not really stated enough here on this forum (as far as I am concerned) is that it is very easy to hit the wall in dealing with the AxeFx products without having a pretty good understanding of how (in particular) tube amplifiers actually work and how their somewhat different designs exploit the fundamentals of the mechanisms involved.

I'm not just talking about how to turn the different knobs on an amplifier. I'm talking more about the fundamentals...

...how transformers work, how linear power supplies work, how inductors and capacitors work in different ways for different purposes in amplifiers in relation to the other components in common audio circuit topologies, how resistors are used in various ways, how basic filters work, how both negative and positive feedback (stability and oscillation topics) works within those topologies, what the real difference is between Class A and Class AB power topologies, how impedance matching devices work such as output transformers, how speaker motors work, what the difference is between voltage amplification and power amplification, how tubes, both preamp and power tubes work and how they are biased in different ways and what that even means, what triode, pentode, and ultra-linear operation is, how the circuits in your guitar are interfaced to the amplifier yada, yada, yada... There are lots of good books and net based learning tools for this.

The point is that if you don't understand the fundamentals of all these things it becomes increasingly difficult to describe some of the mechanisms in the AxeFx that attempt to model and provide (often extra) control over many of these parameters. And this doesn't even yet address the whole world of effects and how the fundamentals of their designs interface to the amplification signal paths.

So when someone puts you off with a short answer and to use your ear, please try to understand that they may simply be saying that you may need to do a little (or a lot) of homework to really makes sense of an answer that might otherwise get very involved in the necessary fundamentals to adequately describe a given mechanism. Often this does require that your ear is also trained to discern the difference among many different fundamental audio mechanisms so that you can learn to predict what some abstract circuit definition might sound like as fundamental mechanisms are piled on top of each other in the overall signal path that you are working with. Hope that helps? Maybe?
Click to expand...
For me their is a lot of truth in what you wrote. I got my FM3 @4 months ago and did a post "old dog new tricks". I was convinced that something was wrong with all the high gain presets, I thought they sounded like crap. I had a lot of nice people reply trying to help even though I'm sure they knew the problem was me. I knew nothing of any of the fundamentals it was easer to blame the FM3. To get these Fractal modelers to really show what they can do, at least for me, you have to take the time to learn some of the basics you mentioned. I took 30mins each evening to look up and learn something new, if it was over my head (a lot is) I would just move on to something that was not . Now 90% of my rigs are high gain amps and what my FM3 can do just blows me away every time I plug in.
 
To the "get educated" responses, I say some of us don't want to spend our time learning how amps work, but we do want to know how using a certain parameter affects tone. I don't believe the 2 are mutually exclusive either.
I read thru Randall Smith's writeup about how tubes work, and I still didn't understand it. I don't have enough of a foundation, and I don't care to spend my time gaining it either. That time gets spent playing guitar. But watching Pete Thorn describe how a bright cap switch affects his tone was very enlightening.
And to use an analogy from my own area of expertise, I can teach a new carpenter how to cut rafters to frame a roof without going through the trigonometric theory behind why it works. I have all that theory, because that's how I learned, but I don't need it to get to the end result.
However, I do understand how having the underlying knowledge that makes whatever it is you're doing, come together, can take you farther, I don't agree that it's necessary to become adept enough to craft a tone you're happy with.
I also get the very distinct impression there are posters here who should perhaps understand that their way is not the right and only way for everybody. It comes across to me like having a gf who feels the need to change you.
 
TSJMajesty said:
To the "get educated" responses, I say some of us don't want to spend our time learning how amps work, but we do want to know how using a certain parameter affects tone. I don't believe the 2 are mutually exclusive either.
I read thru Randall Smith's writeup about how tubes work, and I still didn't understand it. I don't have enough of a foundation, and I don't care to spend my time gaining it either. That time gets spent playing guitar. But watching Pete Thorn describe how a bright cap switch affects his tone was very enlightening.
And to use an analogy from my own area of expertise, I can teach a new carpenter how to cut rafters to frame a roof without going through the trigonometric theory behind why it works. I have all that theory, because that's how I learned, but I don't need it to get to the end result.
However, I do understand how having the underlying knowledge that makes whatever it is you're doing, come together, can take you farther, I don't agree that it's necessary to become adept enough to craft a tone you're happy with.
I also get the very distinct impression there are posters here who should perhaps understand that their way is not the right and only way for everybody. It comes across to me like having a gf who feels the need to change you.
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Yeah I get that. When it isn't your expertise then it's just like anything else. You do have to absorb it one concept at a time and build it up slowly. We all have to do that.

But your example of Pete's bright cap switch is a good place to start. This type of thing can have quite an effect on tone. But the beauty of it is that the underlying concept involves simple RC filters, that is Resistance-Capacitance filters that involves just two components, a resistor (of some form) and a capacitor (of some form). You can use these to form a high pass or a low pass filter in the signal chain depending upon how the resistance and the capacitance is configured in the circuit.

Once you understand that effect, you wouldn't believe how that concept is used in so many different places throughout the guitar and amplifier signal chain. Even in just your guitar cable alone! So understanding the fundamentals of how just one switch works can means that you now understand how that same effect occurs or is applied in a bunch of other places in the chain where the effect on tone is (or can be) quite similar.
 
tealtonerick said:
But your example of Pete's bright cap switch is a good place to start. This type of thing can have quite an effect on tone. But the beauty of it is that the underlying concept involves simple RC filters, that is Resistance-Capacitance filters that involves just two components, a resistor (of some form) and a capacitor (of some form). You can use these to form a high pass or a low pass filter in the signal chain depending upon how the resistance and the capacitance is configured in the circuit.
Click to expand...
Ok, but that's all "Greek" to me. How far back into the "basics" of electronics theory would one have to go to truly grasp this, in order to use that knowledge in other places? I've tried. I can't even wrap my head around the actual direction electrons flow vs. the notated (might be the wrong word) way. (My understanding is they are opposite one another.)

Really understanding these concepts, but being able to explain them in terms that people without that level of understanding can grasp, can be 2 very different things. It's like, for me, when I teach a new carpenter, or explain something to a homeowner, I try to be very cognizant of the terms I use, because it's so completely natural to me, that I have to remind myself that I have a level of understanding that these 2 audiences do not have.

People do that here. Terms get used to describe a certain characteristic of tone, that the writer may understand has a very specific definition, yet many readers don't know that. It's hard to grasp a lot of what makes one tone sound better than another, with just words. Ears indeed.

And that's where I seem to get tripped up whenever I've tried to gain knowledge about these types of concepts. I can get lost very early in either the text explanation, or the video, whichever it may be, and I'm left thinking I either need to go back to entry-level, college electronics courses (which I'd love to do, but time and money and ROI kinda get in the way of that idea), or, I try to find an explanation that not only describes the parameter in question, but also demonstrates how changing that particular parameter affects the sound.

Just reading text explanations don't do it for me. But perhaps in an answer to a question, someone were to post 2 presets, that varied in only 1 particular parameter, with maybe an appropriate explanation ("In the 2nd preset you can hear how the mid frequencies become more pronounced", for example..., something like that), that I can start to grasp. Which is why I mentioned the Pete Thorn video.

Personally, I just need to be able to hear how specific tweaks affect the tone. I don't seem to comprehend it by just reading up on how transformers, etc. work. And I suspect I'm not alone.
 
TSJMajesty said:
Ok, but that's all "Greek" to me. How far back into the "basics" of electronics theory would one have to go to truly grasp this, in order to use that knowledge in other places? I've tried. I can't even wrap my head around the actual direction electrons flow vs. the notated (might be the wrong word) way. (My understanding is they are opposite one another.)

Really understanding these concepts, but being able to explain them in terms that people without that level of understanding can grasp, can be 2 very different things. It's like, for me, when I teach a new carpenter, or explain something to a homeowner, I try to be very cognizant of the terms I use, because it's so completely natural to me, that I have to remind myself that I have a level of understanding that these 2 audiences do not have.

People do that here. Terms get used to describe a certain characteristic of tone, that the writer may understand has a very specific definition, yet many readers don't know that. It's hard to grasp a lot of what makes one tone sound better than another, with just words. Ears indeed.

And that's where I seem to get tripped up whenever I've tried to gain knowledge about these types of concepts. I can get lost very early in either the text explanation, or the video, whichever it may be, and I'm left thinking I either need to go back to entry-level, college electronics courses (which I'd love to do, but time and money and ROI kinda get in the way of that idea), or, I try to find an explanation that not only describes the parameter in question, but also demonstrates how changing that particular parameter affects the sound.

Just reading text explanations don't do it for me. But perhaps in an answer to a question, someone were to post 2 presets, that varied in only 1 particular parameter, with maybe an appropriate explanation ("In the 2nd preset you can hear how the mid frequencies become more pronounced", for example..., something like that), that I can start to grasp. Which is why I mentioned the Pete Thorn video.

Personally, I just need to be able to hear how specific tweaks affect the tone. I don't seem to comprehend it by just reading up on how transformers, etc. work. And I suspect I'm not alone.
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OK, that's good feedback. I did make several assumptions when I wrote what I did. I often do not want to be too overly basic when I try to explain something about electronics. I'm sure you know what I mean when some other carpenter who doesn't know you at all starts explaining to you that trees are made of wood. Lol!

So yeah, it takes a little while to get in sync with where people are at concerning any topic. People here are all over the map just like anywhere else. But I never like to insult anyone's experience right off the bat if I can help it. In the end, what hits our ears (brain) is all that we are really going for. We all have to work back to the conceptual realm from there. All I can say is that I have learned over quite some time that if I am not asking any stupid questions, then I am not learning anything. In that sense of course we all know that there is really no such thing as a stupid question. I am just as happy to ask them as I am happy to try to answer them.
 
And don't forget ear fatigue. When relying on your ears, you need to take a break occasionally. This depends on the person, but I've dialed in tones and come back the next day and said "Damn, what was I thinking ?". Also having some idea of where to start or, in my case, having someone with experience using Fractal products, was a big help.
 
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