Sunday, December 18, 2011

Dialling PODX3 Tones

The little black corner of the room
I was a devout multi-fx user for a great bulk of my life as a guitarist. I figured that it was possible to get by with emulation

While the stock tones were usable in only certain situations, they were nowhere near as organic as what the PODX3 clips were suggesting through my guitars (I suppose that's the beauty of having access to expensive guitars and paying sound engineers to post-process your clips).

Alas, we must work-around the problem at hand. Here are three of my biggest tips for PODX3 users:

Patches for live should be different from patches used to record
You have 128 patch locations at your disposal. Surely you can spare some for various situations. For playing live, I'd get rid of the reverb, tweak the EQ in the midrange to get the guitar to cut through, and generally don't use too much high gain tones because it just gets muddy when mixed together with the rest of the band.

Different guitars need different patches
The problem with digital is that all the nuances accompanying your guitar get lost; every guitar starts to sound the same, just with differing levels of drive, spank and twang (I'm grossly generalizing the differences between a Les Paul, a Strat and a Tele, by the way). I've had to specifically dial in tones that accentuate the nuances, quite unlike my analog rig where most of my pedals are transparent, allowing the character of the guitars to shine through even on the same settings.

A 4x12" cab sim sounds great recorded, but it's going to be boomy and muddy live
The sound guys will be immensely happy if you helped them focus your sound to the mids where the guitar's voice predominantly is, instead of having the big, large and full-range tone that the 4x12" cab sims try to emulate.

And for those who asked:
My top 4 most used tones to date which work best for live situations straight into a PA using a humbucking guitar that has a coil split.

For further reading:
Benvesco's Blog (The person who taught me a lot about tweaking the POD)
089Ray's Blog (This person has spent many hours tweaking, and he's got a great ear. Check it out!)

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Twitter Delicious Facebook Digg Stumbleupon Favorites More