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.

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No one size fits all

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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.

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Reverse Engineering or Start with the output

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Organization is key

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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:

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Now if you look over to Setlists:

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You’ll see I created a folder marked ATOMIC.

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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

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

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