Amp/Guitar modeling and related discussion thread

I guess, we had a different idea of looking at it. I wasn't looking at it from the perspective of it having the line out connected to mixer approach, since I connect my X3 Live to active monitors and thus any power amp/speaker configuration I would need to use at any point in time.

Moving on now, I'm going to start trying to record with this thing now that I believe I've dialed in some decent tone.
As long as I don't run into any hassles, I'll try to post clips once my internet connection is back up to 12mbps.

Edit: Just recorded some stuff, but unfortunately clips have to wait, but I got 4.67ms of latency. I guess this means I'll be keeping the POD for a while yet:)


Edited by Petrovsk Mizinski - May 25 2009 at 07:37

^I used ASIO4All, yes.
And before you ask, I tried the ASIO X3 Live driver and Line 6 decided you only needed to go as low as 128 samples for the buffer size.
This would be great except for the fact latency is not going to be any lower than 10.9ms. Why Line 6 decided to cap the lower limit at 128 buffers just really just beyond me. I also can't get lower than a sampling rate of 48KHz which also doesn't help latency.
If I want lower, ASIO4All is the only driver that is going to get me there since it allows me to use a 96 KHz sampling rate and a smaller buffer size.
So if it's true that I can only get 16 bits, what I lose in bits I make up for in the sampling rate.
How that actually compares in the real world is another thing obviously.
Plenty of people are recording their X3 Live through ASIO4All because they suffered the same problem of the Line 6 ASIO driver not allowing a buffer size below 128 samples and yet some of these guys sound amazing, so I'm really not concerned as long as the latency is below 5ms which it is:)

^Not entirely sure what you mean.
Ableton Live Suite 8 is telling me I'm getting 10.9ms with the POD X3 Live ASIO setting, so are you saying that since I'm using the X3 Live as my soundcard/monitoring anyway I should actually be achieving less latency in the real world and that Ableton is showing me a number with errors?
Sorry if that was perhaps a dumb question, but I honestly wasn't sure if I'm reading what you're saying correclty

 

debrewguy wrote: Petrovsk Mizinski wrote: I don't buy the sound comes from your fingers bullsh*t and never really did. If it's true, just walk onto the stage with nothing and apparently the sounds of the guitar and amp are going to magically going to come out of your hands and fingers. Bullsh*t. Tone is the result of many many factors. The body wood of the guitar, the materials in the bridge and type of bridge, the wood of the neck, the wood of the fretboard, how the neck is constructed, what brand of strings, what gauge of strings, what the nut is made of and then what the frets are made of. Then we have what amp settings you use, what amp you use in particular , what pedals you have connected, whether they are true bypass or not. On an album it comes down to how it mixed and mastered, how many times you tracked the guitar and what mic you used etc etc. On stage, it's about the venue size, whether the floor transmits too much bass, whether you are going direct to FOH and coming out of studio monitors, whether you are going through your amp mic'd up and sending that to FOH. In the end, your fingers can shape things like picking dynamics, articulation, subtlety, nuance. When you hear a great guitarist, like Guthrie Govan or David Gilmour, they have that ability to do that, but they also choose certain gear too because they have tonal needs in mind. DB - Yes, but their sound, their style is in their playing, right. So debrewguy, tell me why you had a Tube Screamer modified if you apparently think you can sound great without decent gear? DB - didn't get it modified, bought as such. For $42CAD. found out afterwards. It has a bit more gain to it. f**k that man, don't spend money, just walk into a room empty handed and guitar tone magically comes from your hands and fingers DB - a good guitar player can make a decent amp & guitar sound good. A poor guitar player will not sound better no matter what set up he has. I have a 30 yr old Yamaha FG-325. I sound not too bad on it. Mostly because of tricks (suspended chords, open chordings etc.). I've had semi-pro players pick it up & make it sound like a $2000 guitar. Fact is, my old practice amp sounds like a buzzy piece of sh*t no matter how much I practiced and get better as a guitarist. I sound 1000 times better than my Line 6 POD because it has the tonal options I need. DB - I'm not saying that you can't get a variety of tones out of a multi-effects unit. I'm saying that  too often, the technology overcomes the actual playing. It's great to hear someone sound exactly like Gilmour, Angus, or Hendrix. I prefer to hear someone play , say, David Gilmour, on a SG through a Vox; or Santana via a Strat & Jazz Chorus. It makes it interesting to see what they can do. But technology is & should be nothing more than the icing on the cake. Even the few pedals I have won't make me sound like Billy Gibbons, SRV, or Rothery. And at most, the only other effect I want is an echo/delay pedal. Too often, you see guitarists that get the exact same set up as their idols, yet can't sound like them. Used to be, until the early 80s, that most bands had their own sound. BTO used Garnet amps, Blackmore with his Strat through some sort of Tape Machine as a mega boost before hitting his amp, Jimmy Page with his Les Paul tricked out so that he could choose a thousand variations from his pickups (Neck & Bridge, HB or Single Coil, mix of them all), Gilmour and his succession of delay/echo pedals, Strats through Marshall, Gibson Firebirds through Twin Reverbs, Hand made guitars throug Vox and /or deacky. Now it's pile on the effects, triple rectify, and still come out sounding like everyone else trying to sound like X, Y, or Z. I know, they're fun. And I had my eyes on a used Boss GT-8, whose owner ( a semi pro jazzbo) had a bunch of great clean jazz sounds preset in the unit. $300 CAD plus taxes (14%). Then it hit me. Upgrading my Pickups on my Epiphone LP Custom would make it sound better. So I've picked up a pair of '57 classic re-issues. I've got my Traynor YCV50's clean & gain channels (gain also has a boost function). I've got the aforementioned TS9 mod, the Boss FBM '59 (which I'll see how the new pickups sound with it. I may sell it), a Line ToneCore Ubermetal, a Boss CE-2 CHorus. And may, I'll get a delay/echo pedal. BEtween all of that, I should be short of time if I ever decide to find all the different sounds that I am able to get without resorting to a multi-effects unit and try to sound like someone else. I do like to get certain tones. But in the end, I'm playing what I got in my hands. Plugged into what I have as an amp. The middle part may change, may expand, but is not likely to, may decrease (likely). Indeed, many times, I don't use all the pedals in a playing session anyway. Concentrate on the song.

I can bet it's just really FG-325 sounding like it's being played by a good player rather than it sounding like " a 2000 dollar guitar".
Someone else picking up a guitar does not change the inherent tone of an instrument.
Player from player is a variable, but the inherent tone of an instrument is set in stone.
It's not a hard concept to understand mate.
I don't even understand why you've come into this thread and even started just saying this.
I didn't buy an X3 Live with the intention of sounding like my "idols" whatever that even means anymore, I bought it because I needed a flexible device that is going to offer me different amp/cabinet/mic/stomp box simulations and also have a unit that allows me to record directly into my computer without having to f**k around with mic placement.

I live at home with my parents and II have a limited budget.
If you could care to donate money for me to live by myself so I can afford a house and various tube amps and real pedals, microphones, another recording interface, then hey I can start recording via a tube amp.
But unfortunately that is not going to be the case so the X3 Live is the best solution I can have right now given my budget and my living situation.
I need 4 channels.
One is an extremely clean sound with no break up
The second is a clean sound with breakup
The 3rd is high gain rhythm tone
the 4th is a high gain lead tone.
I also would a need a MIDI control output.
The only amps of that I know off the top of my head that can do this is a Marshall JVM and MI Amplification Revelation.
I do not have 3399 AUD nor the 3699 AUD for either amp respectively.
Nor do I have a place to consistently crank them up to make them sound really good.
The fact is, no matter what gear you have, you need to tweak it to make it sound the best.
Some of my most favorite albums of all time have been recorded with amps that require months and months of tweaking to sound amazing.
Images and Words was recording using Mesa Boogie amps, notorious for being extremely tricky to dial in.
But isn't it funny how now it's known as one of the greatest prog metal albums of all time, but I do not see your name on the credits of any extremely innovative and creative albums despite your apparently "concentrate on the song" attitude. Petrucci also got some pretty gnarly tone as well on that album to boot.
Opeth has used a Boss GT-8 for an album too. Whether Opeth is to your taste or not, a lot of people liked Ghost Reveries, so clearly the GT-8 did not get in the way of the writing process.
Steve Wilson has used a POD for either Deadwing or In Absentia (don't remember which exactly) yet he got great tones and made an album a lot of people loved.


Tweaking and technology only gets in the way of the music creation if someone lets it.
When I bought my X3 Live, within about 4 days, of perhaps 2 hours of tweaking per day, and even between tweaking to check the tone I'm constantly writing new riffs, I was already recording and putting down some music on my computer.
Using a modeling unit/amp is a totally reasonable and rational approach for recording/using for writing music just as using an amp cranked up and mic'd up.

^ I think you always need some EQ to get a good tone ... simply because every guitar is different. A cool thing that you can do with the POD is to record the dry signal and then not pass it to the POD-Farm plugin directly, but route it through a EQ in Ableton first. Gives you much more flexibility than the 4 band semi parametric EQ of the POD X3.

Edited by Mr ProgFreak - May 28 2009 at 12:36

^ here we go again, comparing €300 gear with €3000 gear ... 

^ we could go on like this for months and never reach an agreement. I really like some of the X3 models, and I don't even have to use the semi parametric EQ to get a sound that's ok for practicing purposes. I'm sure that not all of the 78 models sound good, and maybe none of them is truly great, but I really don't care. I won't spend a four figure amount on a tube amp that might give me a better sound but is *much* less convenient to use.

Of course I think your comments are useful ... people who think about buying an X3 Live should know that a real tube amp still has the potential to sound much, much better. Eventually Line 6 will publish a new version of their modeling technology, and I'm sure that it will sound better than their current technology but there will still be tube amps that sound better.

I know that all this must be really confusing to those who never played a real tube amp and are now wondering whether they should get one or a modeling amp instead. It's a different situation for me - as a beginner I had a solid state amp (Peavey), then I got a tube amp (Engl) ... and today I'm using a modeling amp. So I know all three worlds (analog solid state, analog tube, digital modeling) first hand ...

GaryB wrote: Like I said, I'm not a techy but I had a lot of fun with this project and can now see that all of this new equipment gives someone endless possibilities when it comes to their personal music.   BTW...I recently picked up the Jimi Hendrix Signature pedal by Digitech. It's pretty hi-tech for me but I plan on spending more time with it (not to sound like,or to cover Hendrix but just to see what all it can do).

That's true. The possibilities for direct recording alone with that Jimi Hendrix pedal are pretty impressive. You've got Marshall Plexi tones, Univibe, Octavia, Fuzz Face, and Clyde Wah all in a single pedal.

As you know, Boss puts a whole lot into a small package. The BR864 is about the size of a laptop computer but has 8 tracks with 64 virtual tracks, a drum machine, looping, bouncing, auto punch-in/out, mixing, mastering, individual track EQ, etc.  Someone with a little bit of experience could really do a lot with it. In recording my CD I probably used only 20% of this machine's capability.