There are a number of things I’ve recently noticed working with the POD HD, but the biggest one that’s jumped out at me is how dynamic the guitar gain is now.

For example: with POD Farm, I can dial in a good tone but rolling down my volume doesn’t really affect the timbre of the signal. While the volume lowers it’s tonally the same.

With the Pod HD, if I have a distorted track and back off the gain – it acts more like a tube amp does and cleans up a little. My go to Marshall rhythm sound right now is a JTM-45 with the volume rolled off about 20 %. It’s a really useful function.

I was thrown for a small loop when I went to track some Rough Hewn Trio tunes last week. I had eq’d and set everything up for miking an amp but when we went to go track it, Craig preferred DI’ing the POD instead. As the Atomic Amp I use (more info below) colors the sound (less highs and more bass), the tweaking I had done to dial in the tones with the amp was now resulting in some tones that were not happening in the headphones.

Lesson 1: Be willing to take your own advice!!

Back in the Laptop Guitar rig/AU Lab posts – I had talked about the necessity for setting up multiple guitar tones for multiple occasions. I had gotten a little tunnel visioned on how we were going to track and in doing so forgot to set up direct signals. Lesson learned.

Lesson 2: Whenever possible, have a plan B.
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It’s difficult to track something if you’re not happy with the tone. Also, until you’re actually tracking things – it’s often difficult to know how your tone is going to fit into the mix overall. With both of those observations in mind, I try to track things with a dry signal (i.e. un-affected) as well. This has 2 advantages:

I can get a tone happening that I like and am comfortable with. If it’s a solo, this might be a take with some verb and delay to fill out the tone. but that specific tone might not work in the mix.
If that tone doesn’t end up working in the track, I have a duplicate performance recorded as a dry signal that I can re-amp.

For those of you not familiar with that term, re-amping is the process of running a pre-recorded guitar signal through an amplifier (or modeller) and recording it. It’s often done to “punch up” lethargically timbred guitar tones. In this case, it’s a tonal safety net in case the tone doesn’t end up working down the road.

Splitting the signal – the easy way

The easiest way to do this is to get an ABY Box. I like the Radial Bigshot. It sells for about $80 but it’s really well-built and should last you forever.

Run your guitar into the ABY box input.

Run one line out to the modeller and one line into a mic pre. Then run the modeller to the amp or to the DAW via USB.

Note:

For those of you with a SPDIF in – the POD HD can send an unaffected signal through SPDIF as well. See the POD manual for details.

When I track this way, I just mute the direct guitar signal and monitor with the FX’d track. Most DAWs have plenty of tracks. But the danger of recording wet signal is that if it doesn’t work in context – there’s no way to un-affect it.

To re-amp with the POD HD:

The way I use – involves running a signal out of the DAW into the 1/4″ POD input and then running the processed signal back out of the POD (via the 1/4″ out) and recording it on an empty track on the DAW.

As a variation, you could assign the POD as your audio drive and send the track via usb to the pod and re-amp it by cabling the mono out to the guitar in. (Big thanks to Line 6 Don for this suggestion – you can see his steps here.)

That’s all for now!!

Thanks for reading!

-SC

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GEAR

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For the Onibaba show last night, I decided to use only the laptop rig that I’ve been working with and not use the typical Atomic/Pod X3 rig that I use. The short of it is that from a technical standpoint – it worked without a hitch. I don’t think that anyone noticed that there weren’t “real amps” there and tonally it fit the bill. There were, however, a few little quirks that needed to be sussed out.

1 The room we were playing in had very high ceilings and was really boomy. Sounded great on acoustic instruments – but I had to be really careful of not getting washed out tone wise.

2 The midi assignments for Sooper Looper stopped working when I used the FBV express board. The board worked fine – but I’ll probably just return it and get a breakout box instead. The FBV Express can control about 6 functions – but ultimately I’d like to control about 10-12 functions – so I think it makes more sense to just trigger it manually.

No one size fits all

As I’ve mentioned here, there are a number of variances that occur with modeling:

“I’m in the process of working on sounds on the X3 Live for the show – and tweak PA vs. amp sounds. One thing I’ve noticed with modeling is that there are at least 4 different scenarios for setting up sounds:

1. Headphone patches – i.e. practicing or recording

2. Playing through an amp at low volumes

3. Playing through an amp at high volumes

4. Playing through a PA.

You might think that there wasn’t a lot of variance – but the differences between these parameters are huge. I have patches that sound mediocre at low volumes and sound really good when the volume gets goosed a bit. Headphone patches that work well at home and fall apart live – and vice versa.”

So along this line I knew I’d have to tweak some patches I’d been using and make some new ones for the show. I decided to pull some patches I liked and demo them at low volumes in my apartment and then try to fix anything glaringly wrong at the show.

Reverse Engineering or Start with the output

A while ago I mentioned I bought a back up Atomic amp from Guitar Center for $149. The listing was for an Atomic Reactor 1×12 – but both the 50 watt and the 18 Watt are 1×12 – so what I got in the mail was the 18 watt. Initially, I was a little disappointed – but given that you can run it on 115V OR 240V – I figured it was a good investment and that in a worse case scenario I could sell it and make my money back.

When I set up my sounds – I set them up on the 18w. There’s no master volume knob – it just runs at 18 watts – but I could control the output with my duet and set things up at a low volume.

The Atomics in general are very bass heavy so I knew from the get go I’d have to roll a lot of the bass down and tweak other mid and high levels.

AfterI got a tone set up on a lark I decided to try to run it stereo. I pulled out the 50 watt Atomic and there were some weird grounding issues. While I was trying to suss that out I decided to A/B the amps – and see if there was a difference. Suprisingly the 18 Watt sounded MUCH better than the 50 watt. The 18 watt does use different tubes (2 EL34’s and 1 12ax7a as opposed to the 6l6GCs and the 12AX7 in the 50 watt) – but I think that just having the amp full bore made a big difference. The more I cranked the output volume on the Duet – the more the tone sagged in a very pleasing way. Also the 18 watt is DEAD quiet so that solved the issue of the loud fan on the 50 watt version. I knew the 18 Watt was loud but I wasn’t sure if it was fully going to be able to hang with drums, bass, amplified trombone and the awesome sonic terror of Vinny Golia – but it did.

IMPORTANT DUET NOTE:

When setting output volume on the unit – if you choose “Instrument amp” – you get a flat volume that you are unable to control – by setting it to “Line Level” you can adjust the output with the knob on the Duet.

I think the Duet output went to ten – I never went higher than 5 – and at one point turned down to 3. 18 Watts was more than enough for the gig. The drag now is I like the amp enough to sink more money into it and have I have the desire to get the amp re-tolexed. Maybe with like a fender tweed or something. In the meantime I used the 18 watter as a low volume template and could then tweak it further in the space as I needed to.

Organization is key

One reason to go digital is the rigs themselves they take up so little disk space you could save hundreds of them and have individual configurations for almost any situation. This is also one reason NOT to go digital as it’s easy to get overwhelmed with options instead of narrowing it down to a few.

A great feature about POD Farm 2 is that you can create and organize folders with drag and drop ease.

For example let’s begin by looking at how I built my live setup:

First – here’s a sample patch:

Now if you look over to Setlists:

You’ll see I created a folder marked ATOMIC.

Tip:

If you want to control changing setlists from a Midi Controller – Just control click on the up or down arrow, in the Setlist window and then press the midi controller feature you want to use to control it

Within that setlist, I have a series of patches – I name them all Atomic – so I can find them easily if I have to.

Another Tip:

If you want to control changing Programs (i.e different patches) within a setlist from a Midi Controller – Go to the top of the screen – where the patch name is:

Just control click on the up or down arrow to the right of the Patch name, in the and then press the midi controller feature you want to use to control it.

I’ve set it up to be used withthe up and down arrows on the right of the shortboard. I decided to have one folder marked Atomic and then just scroll up and down through the folder to get to patches. You could just as easily set up multiple folders and organize patches (and if you have only 4 tones per Setlist – you could just A/B/C/D them with the shortboard and use the up and down arrows to go between setlists – just like the setup on the PODs).

When I used the pod X3 with the docking station in the Atomic – one feature I would use a lot was the dual rig feature with one rig with a speaker sim – and one with none – It gave the sound a lift in a pleasing way. At the gig I just ran them all through the 4×12 IRs I’ve been using and it sounded fine – I may put the IRs on a bus and mix the two to see how it sounds – but this is the rig I’m using as of this post.

Clarity wise – I felt it had a noticeable advantage over the X3 – but I’ll have to do more experimenting. In a future post – I’ll detail a Dual distortion tone I’ve been developing and discuss some more specifics with using a laptop as a guitar processor live.