The difference is between making a tone that sounds good to your ear, and a tone that fits in a mix. Generally you'll need a lot more harshness and ugly top end to make it sound good with bass and drums underneath.
I bought an FM3 and I have to be honest, it’s nice to have the ability to tweak but there’s so many parameters that can be adjusted with each block, it’s easy to get lost and not know where to start just to make a quick and easy adjustment. Sometimes just can’t beat the ease of use of plugging in to a great sounding amp with a few knobs to get where you want to be. Sounds great, learned something from your technique, thanks man!
I think a lot of your high end fizz comes from having your Bright switch turned on for a lot of them and I often turn it off on my XL +. I also turn the amp saturation to authentic and make sure the tone stack is the same as the amp and not default. I find that really helps with the realism
Fractal = great tool for sound design/audio engineer but also lots of faffing about to find that tone instead of getting on with your playing ... Option paralysis
Richard Williams i have the AxeFX II I still use my 5150 with Cab, just something about the real tube with cab that I always come back to, for recording I love my Axe though, but you’re right it’s endless tweaking.
Awesome tools. Can't go too wrong with a 5150 for rock and metal riffage. Everyone says sound in the room but I'm sure feel and dynamics too. It inspires you to play more, getting into the jam. Modelling & profiling products, pedals and multi effects all help to sculpt the tone further or try gear that you may not have space for in your home, studio or playing live and also let you play gear that you would otherwise may never get to try in real life be it due to being too expensive or rarity of that piece of gear or may help you choose buying more analog gear too. Same for cabinet impulse responses, it may help you find a speaker & cabinet that you really love and you may end up buying it. Axe FX and other products are like the guitarist equivalent of a smart phone, almost everything you need in one box
This is what presets are for. Spend a day learning the III, and then spend another day and make a dozen presets from scratch. Then when its jammy time, you don't touch anything but the power button. Fractal gear sounds phenomenal as a preamp through a good FX loop and tube power section with big cabs. Its only as crazy as you want it to be. Its definitely harder dialing in tones through studio monitors with IRs than just routing it into some guitar gear. Or...spend another day and route it 4CM through your favorite amp, and the world of tOaNZ just got thick in the warm. This is HIGHLY worth doing right if you got all the pieces.
It would be fun to have oodles of gear at your disposal to test all the options but many of us don't have room to have lots of products. Therefore one innovative piece of gear capable of creating great tones and giving you the equivalent of a studio full of gear in one box makes alot of sense for many of us. No worries about all the cables and the problems that can occur from bad patch cables or ground loops also makes it a very practical option from bedroom players right through to professional gigging muscians
I'm watching this for the third time, but I'm skipping the 'talkie' parts and replaying the tones. Oh my good gracious Lord. You have been touched by Thor. Wait...are you him? No matter. Great vid. Great tone.
Agree with the LPF around 9k. I always high pass between 80-120 otherwise you fight the bass guitar. Easier to go live and record when it’s already taken care of from the source. Just how I personally do things.
That baritone is so sick. It might be interesting to do more videos like this but do different genres, sub genres of metal and hardcore, or specific bands.
Arghhh, great video!! I'm all set to buy a JP2C for my birthday this year, now suddenly I'm considering the Axe FX 3 instead. :-/. I think with the JP2C I probably won't need my boss EQ anymore, my reverb pedal anymore, guessing maybe not even my tube screamer. Just a chorus and delay in the loop and wah in front and it should sound great....Axe Fx looks like I could be busy for years tinkering though and I love that stuff!!! So....conflicted...
Not trying to steal your customers or anything ^^ but for Axe FX 3 tips specifically check out Leon Todd's Channel. Great tips, tutorials etc. on how to use the tools provided by fractal audio for an efficient "work flow". For example you can pin the cab picker, and then just click through the cabs and check out how they affect your preset without going back and forth. If you use the built in looper, you don't even have to play to do this ... he has lots of stuff like that :)
A lot of people using amp modelers will leave amp controls at 12 'oclock then shape with eq. Then they will do very minor tweaks to amp controls....very minor
Hey, Fluff! I just got an Axe FX II XL and I’m loving it, this video helped a lot. However, I seem to know a good amount about amps and drive pedals but I know nothing about EQ. I know you covered some of it in this video but could you do a video that’s like EQ, dBs, levels etc because I seriously have no idea how to dial in a tone 😂
Great tones. Did you know I still use Bias FX 1, with a few external pedals at times, and I can still achieve pretty sick tonnage. For someone on a budget like myself, I'm happy with the results. *At least for home use that is.
I have two 1960s one with ElectroVoice Black Label Speakers and one with Celestion 65’s 🤘🤘I definitely like it more than my buddy’s Mesa with V30s something about Vintage tone is just way better than the constant modern push...but it seems everyone just wants a Rectifier more than a Plexi these days...what they don’t know is that a 808 in front of a Plexi is the darkest sounding heart thumping paradise ever created
And this is why I stopped using amp modeling and bought a real amplifier. I’d rather have one great tone that I love and use all the time than a million combinations of different amps, cabs, and mics and no easy way to pick them except by laborious trial and error.
design one great tone that you love and use all the time, and be safe in the knowledge that if you ever need anything else you can do it properly. Your back will thank you, and so will every sound engineer.
I really appreciate your videos! Can you please make a video showing how to use Axe lll with amp head and cabinet , i mean the way to hook them up ? thanks
Good morning everybody I do hope you guys are having a fantastic day, please be good to one another and take care of your family. Be safe. With your endeavors and just love people. God bless and peace out!
It sounds plastic..but also thick and dark and its nice I can say.Its not like real amp but don't care because AxeFx3 has something dark and I like it.
Or a Kemper. You plug in and play with the sound and feel of 1 Million tube amps without trying to "make" it sound good. Every minute of tweaking is a lost minute.
Where’s the stereo width? It sounds like a mono track. I’m so used to using MDA Psuedo Stereo then Stereo Width at the end of my chain in Reaper, that tracks or tone without it sound flat.
It's bugging me that he didn't mess with the levels of the cabs to bring out certain characteristics of each mic, it sounded good but that's just my OCD acting up. Lol
Serious question: I really want to learn how to navigate building tones and anticipating what rearranging and tweaking a guitar pedal chain will do in real life and Bias and/or AxeFX, so is anyone aware of a really great tutorial to help build the logic behind guitar tone? Willing to shell out a good hundred bucks for that if needed.
Samuel Carter “guitar tone” is really broad, classic distortion, modern distortion, blues crunch, many styles of clean. Bias and axe are good cus with one unit you can make almost any tone, but if your going to buy amps and pedals it’s not going to be as flexible
the wolfiest of wolves yeah i know but an axe fx can be very usefull in many way... btw i have a mesaboogie roadster and a evh 5150 6L6 100w i got everything here.
Advantage of this modeling amp is ease of use and practicality but It’s nowhere near the sounds of my Mesa JP-2C. That amp has character and balls. Axe FX to me sounds dry and thin, sorry. 😕
On a youtube video it sounds thin as everything does, in person it freaking sounds amazing. I'm never carrying a 80lbs halfstack or a 160 pound svt fridge to gigs ever again. period!
Well, there's a reason why that combo has the status it does. And the Fractal into your 2:Ninety with 2 Boogie cabs in stereo will absolutely sound as good, its not the same with all the shit in the chain between his guitar and your playback device...trust me, its AMAZING
