Musician Gear & Tech Discussion

Guys,

Ive always been a big amp kinda guy 100+ watts tube til recently I started using my little Mesa Subway Rocket 20 watts tube. We played New Years eve in a bigger room and my little amp seemed too loud to me so Im going to start using a preamp straight into the pa for a few smaller shows coming up over the next few weeks.

Ive got a POD PRO with full footboard. Im going to run it straight into the board and use the monitors and mains for my sound. Truelly a big change over the last 6 monthes for me.

Weve played 27 gigs since July and Ive been steadily trying to downsize to speed up setup and teardown, so this is a sort of evolution for me. I havent tryed it live yet but Ive got my settings ready to go.

Crip if you read this I know that youve changed amps recently, but in your Line 6 amp what kind of settings were you using for your lead tones. I have a good JC120 clean tone, then kind of a Blackface Fender sound that breaks up nicely and then I have my mainstay sound a JCM 800 that works for rythym and lead. But I need an over the top lead sound for my 4th setting and so far I havent found the sweet spot.

Thanks for any input any of you have for Line 6 products.

hey there...
subway rocket is a nice lil piece.

tho I've enjoyed playing a bassman or two from time to time... can't ever seem to stand the vol that gets me the sound I love... so I can't help but feel a 10-20 watt combo is the stuff dreams are made of but you play a marshal... so I'll assume we're after slightly dif things..

anywho, I just thought I'd mention... IMO if you are going straight in using digital gear... about the best thing you could do for yourself is get one of those h&k red boxes. I know line6 has speaker emulators... but the direct box w the analog speaker emulator is an absolute godsend.
just a thought.

Thanks Mikey,

But the POD sounds great straight into the board. Ive never used the speaker emulator you described but Ive never found a direct box that I liked much. I had a little Sansamp for awhile that sounded really good and it had speaker emulation in it. Ive had our pa setup in my garage recently and have been tweaking it. Last night I got out the manual on the POD and you can digitally boost a channel up to 12 DBs to level out the channel levels. In the manual it says to manually set the level to the max for the most headroom and least noise. Which my mainstay channel setting is modeled after a JCM 800, that Ive tweaked for my purposes. I was having trouble making my clean sound (Fender Blackface level out with my Marshall sound, but with the extra boost I can put on it digitally I think that over the next week I will be able to get my channels leveled out for live play.

Channel 1 Roland JC 120
Channel 2 Fender BlackFace
Channel 3 Marshall JCM 800
Channel 4 Soldano SLO



These are my basic settings and then Ive been tweaking them to suit my needs. We have a gig next sat in a really small room and I am going to try it out. We have a great monitor system and great mains so it should be cool. But and this is a big but, you just dont get the same interaction between the guitar amp and pedals that I am used to and fond of. But going 100% pa should spread the sound a lot more even in the room than has been happening up to now. We have been sounding really good live, but I hope this will improve the room sound even more and eliminate 1 mic to cut down on feedback issues.

Im just trying to streamline my setup, I can put the POD unit in our rack and all I have to do is hook up the pedal and run my wireless into the front of the unit. There will be a lot less wiring and such to go wrong or taint my signal.

This past weekend we had a power hickup and the power flashed off and on, my wireless reciever is wired into my pedal board. It turned off while everything else turned back on. I was freaking out for a minute or two trying to figure out if I blew my amp.

Mikey,

The little Subway has turned into my go to amp the last few monthes. In fact this past week I kinda sound tested all my bigger amps for our New Years show which was in a bigger room. I felt like the Subway smoked my Triple Rectifier and Roadster tonewise, so I left the other amps at home.

I would recomend to anyone looking at amps to look at some of the smaller 20 watt EL 84 based amps, these smaller tube amps just sound great and you can really push into them a lot better than the big amps. Plus being small helps a lot also. I bought this amp new 15 yrs ago and its always been around for my quick pick up an amp and jam type deals, but its quickly moved to number one in my arsenal.

Big amps are great if you only do a handfull of shows or you have roadies but the more you get out and play the more you will appreciate the portability of a smaller amp.

Thanks for any input any of you have for Line 6 products.

Do you like my lead tones? It is pure 100% Line 6 with passive pickups (at the recording time) I can share my tones with you, you can import them and twick them. If you have not yet done so, there is Line 6 Edit available from their site. On my demos there are 5 different tones used.

Let me know I can send you the file and you can import it in and play around with it - see if you find what you like.

jw123

There: http://www.alexandern.com/tones/
You will find all my Line 6 tones and MP3 files with little snippet so you know what it sounds like. If you like any of it download and import with Editor in to your Line 6, then change if you want.

SP there is a huge difference in percieved volume between a 100 watt tube amp and a 20 watt tube amp. Our soundman has a db meter I should bring him over and get some readings off my amps out of curiousity.

Thanks for the sharing of the lead tones. Yours are for recording purposes and Im setting up for live and there is a huge difference. I set our pa up in my garage and am tweaking tones over the next week or so. For lead I like a sound based off the Soldano SLO it just cuts to the bone, but the JCM 800 setting I have works great also.

I will try to grab and save a couple of your settings as using the POD allows me to have a lot larger range of tones at my disposal. Nothing like dialing in one of you favorite amp simulations and tweaking it.

The key to me with the POD PRO or breakthru is the fact that I can digitally increase the level of settings Ive programed. This is allowing my to level out the channels without changing the tonal characteristics of the sound. If someone on her has one of these pod units I would say get the manual out and learn all the tricks. Its a really cool device.

Better to have it and not need it then need it and not have it.

You will have to change the settings slightly anyway. You play LP with passive electronic and I play fender with active. Those are two very different sounding instruments by themselves.

AlexanderN

I just was sitting at work and turned on your player.

Youve got some great axe skills there. Great variety of tones and dynamics.

Thanks for sharing!

JW

Youve got some great axe skills there. Great variety of tones and dynamics.

Thank you JW123. Though I would give my left nut to be as good as you and to have a band.

So far no one is interested in my nuts: http://www.polianna.com/2005/10/images/mixtures-nuts-deluxe-rs_000.jpg And devil would not trade for my soul. No value he say. For now I am in a headphone hell. For the exception of drums on Twilight and The Sign all recorded in my bedroom plugged in directly in to the cheap sound card on my stock HP Windblows box. (Drums on The Sign and Twilight are recorded from a rented Roland drum kit in to my old Toshiba laptop)

For everyone interested in checking out Line 6

Tones is the reason I love Line 6. Because I can't afford to have 100 different amps and even if I had one amp I could not play through it much less record in my little apartment.

Line 6 out of the box - I did not find a single tone I liked. So I flashed the chip and bought some extra amp and cabinet modes. Then I spent about a year twicking the nubs to get what I wanted. Only then I discovered that there is such a thing as Line 6 Editor that allows to plug the device in to the computer and do all the settings in a comfort of graphical user interface on a PC rather then fiddling with all the little nubs and buttons. Then you can also save a copy of it and if you wish put it on another Line 6, POD or rack mount unit.

Other then Line 6 (and hands) the pickups play a great part in the way it all sounds. The pickups I used on the first two tracks are active EMG 81(b) and 85(n). They seem to sustain forever. The "feedback" effect without amp was achieved by using E-Bow devise. It is a bit tricky to get used to it, and there is a lot yet to be unlocked from that little jabbie. Before that (the rest of the tracks) I had stock Fender passive pickups.

In my setup active electronics produce cleaner tone. They combined with the electromagnetic shielding allow to move around and have no dirt in the pauses. Before I had to sit pointed in to a specific direction and do not move else it will start white noise again. Not to mention the gate threshold settings that I can now open - helps with all that tapping and pinched harmonics.

So if you are reading this and looking in to Line 6 keep in mind that while it is (IMO) a nice unit it is in the middle between your guitar and the rest of your setup. It may not be for you because of the kind of sound you want, kind of guitar you have, kind of amplification you use and kind of player you are.

JW123
In your case you play live and on LP, that guitar has it's own unmistakable sound. I am sure none of those tones will sound the same when you try to use them in your rig.

I play a Gibson Les Paul Classic 1960 Reissue 95% of the time. I have 2 of them and it has its own sound. Big fat ballsy rock n roll. Those stock t-500 rear pickups will crush any amp preamp into distortion.

Yea Ive been playing with the POD some and have around 8 tones stored that I am going to try this weekend and see how it goes. Ive taken it to a coupld of gigs and chickened out at the last minute.

But we have a small room to play and i want to go ahead and take in the subs and dual 15 pa mains and run mine 100% thru the pa. Weve worked real hard with our pa system and it sounds so clean its rediculous. So this should wotk great.

Over time I hope to develop more tones in the pod toi give me some variety, but for now all I need is 1 good clean, a dirtied up clean, then my Marshall setting and then the SLO setting. Of course Ive tweaked these to suit my tastes.

I think a lot of poepl get these units and dont take the time to learn what they will really do, the manuals are very good cause some of the amp simulations interact totally different with the tone controls than what you would think.

Anyway I'll try to give a follow up next week to how the gig went.

Youve got some great axe skills there. Great variety of tones and dynamics.

Thank you JW123. Though I would give my left nut to be as good as you and to have a band.

Thanks for the props, but being good or bad makes little difference to me at this stage in the game. For me its all about emotionally moving an audience. If I can do that even to the point that they dislike me, I feel Ive done my job and Im not just MUZAK or background noise.

Youve got great chops from your demo and Im sure some group could use your skills.

Stay Patient

Sat Night I went ampless for the first time.

I had some sounds programmed but in the end I wound up using the Marshall JCM 800 sound I had programmed. Our band sounded better than ever. The stage volume was low enough that we could really hear the vocals which made harminizing a cinch. Im used to an amp blowing on my leg and didnt like it but when I walked out front the sound from the pa was amazing. Our mix was slicker than ever, in fact for the time being my bassist and i have decided to just leave the amps at home and use the preamps for a while.

One side note in the above post I mentioned that the POD output level can be digitally increases. Well I would up getting a real high pictched feedback off the preset I bumped up in this fashion. I never got to set the pa up and play with it this last week and I set my levels with my little recorder.

Ive got to dial in a few more sounds so I will have a bigger selection next gig.

Rock ON

Aha!
So you just did answer to my question in "amplification advice" post . The idea of using POD in to PA and not using any other guitar amps does work and it makes things sound better. Thank you. You have made up my mind. A) I no longer feel apprehension for selling my Marshall and B) I am getting that PA.

Thanks!

Alexander the only shortcoming I would see is if you dont have good monitors. Our bass player and a I both went ampless and we share a monitor feed so it worked well, we pumped the guitar and bass in our monitor send. If you play with folks using a live amp and they play loud you probably wont like it much. In the past with amps we had to crank the drums in our monitors. Well since there were no stage amps we basically took the drums out of the monitors and listened to them acoustically. Taking them out of the monitors some cuts out feedback issues, also me not using a mic on an amp cut out feedback issues. Our singer and drummer share a monitor signal and we put a little guitar and bass in their signal. Another thing that happened was we could really hear the vocals. Weve started doing some 4 part harmony stuff and the reduced stage volume allows us to really hear the vocals.

On the downer side I still like slamming an amp with a wah wah and distortion pedal for my leads. I have some work cut out for me as far as setting up my tones.

On the PA side of things we played a weird room sat and we actually put one of our pa stacks in a seperate room. With the way we are running our stage setup I think we could actually put the pa speakers on the far side of a club and point them back at us without having feedback issues. We play another weird shaped room this coming sat night and I may do some weird speaker placements so people can see the stage better.