Digital Igloo (Eric Klein, YGG)

I must be the only one here who would be willing to throw away every single classic amp model and replace them with Fractal or Line6 originals - amps based on the classics, but done better.

I feel that shifts the discussion from "Is it 1:1 accurate to X amp? Why does it not sound like my exact amp? Why doesn't it sound like a 4x12 played at Wembley Stadium through these car speakers?" to "Yeah, that Ventoux is a beast of an amp and I love it with these settings" where the digital amps become just another amp rather than a constant point of comparison.
 
laxu said:
I must be the only one here who would be willing to throw away every single classic amp model and replace them with Fractal or Line6 originals - amps based on the classics, but done better.
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No, you're not the only one.

Give me "idealized" and/or amps based on new ideas any day.

Also, give me some "playground" amps. Something where I might chose between a handful of drive stacks, a handful of tone stacks, a handful of power amp stacks and maybe a handful of "pre-drives" (kinda like the boosts FAS slaps into their amps straight) and combine them.

And as said before, this is why I really dig Boss' approach. The best sounding amps in their GT-1000 IMO are the "AIRD" and X-Amps, all of which at least not exactly mimicking any real amp.
It's not all that different in the Helix ecoverse, the Litigator, Cartographer, Ventoux and 2204 Mod (well, the latter is at least somewhat following the original, but which amp isn't?) are just great in their own rights.
 
dk_ace said:
It seems like the amps on the Helix respond more like I would expect them to with regard to how much gain they have (and when on the drive knob) when the input pad is on. I’ve heard the same from some other players.

As I understand it from what I’ve read on the forums, that’s essentially padding it down to line level. This doesn’t really make sense to me. It seems like the more accurate response would be the unpadded input signal. Are the amps that you guys modeled just gainier examples than we expect? Or is the padded input really more like plugging straight into the amp with regard to the signal level the amp model sees? Or is there something else going on here entirely?

D
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That's another weird thing about all modelers—the real amp generally sounds best cranked, but at bedroom volume there can be a disconnect. I'm guessing that may be why padding the input sounds more like what some might expect. For the most accurate experience, we recommend leaving the pad off, but maybe try adjusting the model's Master parameter to more closely match your playback volume. Or, y'know, turn your rig up.
 
Digital Igloo said:
That's another weird thing about all modelers—the real amp generally sounds best cranked, but at bedroom volume there can be a disconnect. I'm guessing that may be why padding the input sounds more like what some might expect. For the most accurate experience, we recommend leaving the pad off, but maybe try adjusting the model's Master parameter to more closely match your playback volume. Or, y'know, turn your rig up.
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I’m mostly referencing NMV amps.

What you’re describing usually works the other way around, at lower volume you generally think you need more gain than at a loud gig volume. I’m saying the Helix sounds more gained up than what I expect for the amp models I know (that’s true regardless of the volume I’m referencing at). If I turn it up louder (which I do regularly), it exacerbates that issue instead of helping it. I’m saying amps sometime have the gain at 2 on the drive control that I expect them to have at 4 on the drive control and at 10 I find them to have more gain available than the real amps would.

If I pad the input, things align more to what I would expect from those amp models.

You’re saying it’s most accurate with it off, which means that the specific amps you modeled just have more gain available than I would expect. Vintage amps are all over the place, so maybe you have a particularly hot one or I’ve played only tame ones. Who knows…

D
 
dk_ace said:
I’m mostly referencing NMV amps.

What you’re describing usually works the other way around, at lower volume you generally think you need more gain than at a loud gig volume. I’m saying the Helix sounds more gained up than what I expect for the amp models I know (that’s true regardless of the volume I’m referencing at). If I turn it up louder (which I do regularly), it exacerbates that issue instead of helping it. I’m saying amps sometime have the gain at 2 on the drive control that I expect them to have at 4 on the drive control and at 10 I find them to have more gain available than the real amps would.

If I pad the input, things align more to what I would expect from those amp models.

You’re saying it’s most accurate with it off, which means that the specific amps you modeled just have more gain available than I would expect. Vintage amps are all over the place, so maybe you have a particularly hot one or I’ve played only tame ones. Who knows…

D
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Examples? What are some specific amp models and settings where you experience this?
 
Hi DI and forumers. A few years ago, we, guitar players, saw Impulse Response brought to modelers and pedals. A wave of hardware with a cake to share, companies like Two-Notes proposed dedicated hardware... Today, it is capture time, Kemper, IK's Tonex, Headrush Prime...
The community of users works for feeding the captures. IK has a huge community and to me, there are too many people posting similar Tones (IK's captures). If Line6 enters the market (with a new stomp or inside existing ones), I hope you'll offer an easy tool to "manage" the captures,
like setlists or drag and drop of impulses. Btw, if captures appear on Helix, could presets be similar in term of size to impulses ?
 
dk_ace said:
I’m saying amps sometime have the gain at 2 on the drive control that I expect them to have at 4 on the drive control and at 10 I find them to have more gain available than the real amps would.
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Same here. Although I have never played (most of) the real amps, they seem to get crunchy real fast. The JCM800 model seems to have way more gain than I recall from my youth. Since I’m no metalhead, I always keep the pad on. OTOH, it could also be that we tend to play the models with the master volume dimed, whereas we would not dare to do that with the real amp.
 
dk_ace said:
I’m saying amps sometime have the gain at 2 on the drive control that I expect them to have at 4 on the drive control and at 10 I find them to have more gain available than the real amps would.
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Yeah, I think so, too. Didn't exactly notice a difference in sound when comparing input pad off vs. on (of course after compensating for the loss of level), but dialing in proper gain amounts usually seems easier with it switched on.
The thing that baffled me a bit, though, was when using some drives in a loop for the first time and keeping everything at the defaults - compared to using the drives outside of the HX loop, with input pad on, they seemed to be less gainy. So I'm not exactly sure how things are meant to be like. By default, input pad is off, so I assume it was only meant to be switched on when using very hot pickups (or maybe other kinds of pre-Helix-boosts), but as said, most internal amps seem to profit from it being switched on, even with my medium output guitars.
 
zib said:
Hi DI and forumers. A few years ago, we, guitar players, saw Impulse Response brought to modelers and pedals. A wave of hardware with a cake to share, companies like Two-Notes proposed dedicated hardware... Today, it is capture time, Kemper, IK's Tonex, Headrush Prime...
The community of users works for feeding the captures. IK has a huge community and to me, there are too many people posting similar Tones (IK's captures). If Line6 enters the market (with a new stomp or inside existing ones), I hope you'll offer an easy tool to "manage" the captures,
like setlists or drag and drop of impulses. Btw, if captures appear on Helix, could presets be similar in term of size to impulses ?
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Size as in MB? I would imagine that any product a company makes that supports ML-based capture and/or playback should have enough storage to accommodate enough captures for rock 'n roll. If you're looking to load and browse thousands of captures, the bigger problem is that you're spending more time doing file management than playing music.

The new Grammatico GSG100 amp model from 3.60 is nuts. There'll probably be a few captures of it floating around later this afternoon, but man, the thing is so dynamic and sensitive to small tweaks (just like the real thing), you'll need a couple dozen static captures just to do it justice, and hundreds to make it comprehensive.
 
Thanks Digital Igloo.
Digital Igloo said:
There'll probably be a few captures of it floating around later this afternoon
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Great ! Edit : thanks Line6 for 3.60.



Considering an hypothetic capture reader module in Helix, 3 to 10 amps will be enough to me.
Have a nice day,
Zib
 
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As a Fractal user I am used to constant updates and many are hardly noticeable some even worse than the previous but the trajectory is over time is improvement and by the end of a products life it is very easy to see considerable improvement and many added features. However this isn’t true with the other platforms. How much headroom is there for improvement in the current generation. Particularly as the Kemper is so old. Do we need more power to progress or is it more how well the power is deployed?
 
Eagle said:
As a Fractal user I am used to constant updates and many are hardly noticeable some even worse than the previous but the trajectory is over time is improvement and by the end of a products life it is very easy to see considerable improvement and many added features. However this isn’t true with the other platforms. How much headroom is there for improvement in the current generation. Particularly as the Kemper is so old. Do we need more power to progress or is it more how well the power is deployed?
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If you look at Fractal, you can see the effects of the issues in their previous models. Each generation has put in more processing power, more memory, more firmware, IR etc storage.

Axe-Fx Standard/Ultra were discontinued in favor of the Axe-Fx 2 because the older model just ran out of firmware space for adding new features. Axe-Fx 2 was replaced by Axe-Fx 3 because the Axe-Fx 2 processors were discontinued.

By comparison the Kemper and Helix hardware is quite modest. Afaik the Helix has the same processors as the Fractal AX8, which was a bit of a redheaded stepchild that needed much more work from Fractal to port features than on the current platform so it got discontinued after FM3 release I think.

Both Kemper and Line6 have managed to make the most out of their platforms but I imagine it's getting harder and harder to add more to it. Meanwhile what the Quad Cortex has is afaik one of the more powerful DSP chips that Analog Devices offers, though that might have changed in the past few years so there's not necessarily that many cost effective, more powerful DSPs on the market. I would not be surprised if Line6 is investigating more generic ARM processors for next gen products.
 
Eagle said:
As a Fractal user I am used to constant updates and many are hardly noticeable some even worse than the previous but the trajectory is over time is improvement and by the end of a products life it is very easy to see considerable improvement and many added features. However this isn’t true with the other platforms.
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3.60 is Helix's seventeenth notable feature/model update. We already have a superset of what might make it into 3.70 and 3.80; quite a few items are already finished and sounding great. I'm not aware of any MI hardware product that's evolved from 1.0 as far as Helix has; it was a very different product back in 2015, not just model or feature-wise. People are using it in very different ways.
How much headroom is there for improvement in the current generation. Particularly as the Kemper is so old. Do we need more power to progress or is it more how well the power is deployed?
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There are obvious things like... we can't add a touchscreen or more RAM for looping, but when it comes to model list count or firmware, there's still a long runway ahead of us. Amps and effects take up very little storage/memory and we have plenty left.
laxu said:
I would not be surprised if Line6 is investigating more generic ARM processors for next gen products.
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We have a few products that run on ARM—Catalyst, DL4 MkII, and perhaps some future stuff, but higher end multieffects requiring gobs of simultaneous tasks still work best on dedicated DSPs like those made by ADI (SHARC) and TI.
Rocco Crocco said:
Hey DI. Are there any plans to eventually update Metallurgy with new models/features?
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Wouldn't surprise me. That's another PM's baby and I'm a bit out of the loop there. The vast majority of my day-to-day is spent working on things the public won't see for a while. Some are still many years away.
 
Hey man!

Are the old reference amps from PodXT (and before) days still in Line 6’s collection?

Some noteable ones are:

- Silver Jubilee
- Bogner Ecstasy
- Triple Rectifier
- Diezel Herbert
- Marshall TSL
- Marshall Major
- Marshall 1974X
- Marshall Super Bass
- Soldano SP77
- Dumble
- Peavey 5150 mk2
- ENGL Powerball
- Cornford 50mk2
- Marshall JCM900 4100
 
MirrorProfiles said:
Hey man!

Are the old reference amps from PodXT (and before) days still in Line 6’s collection?

Some noteable ones are:

- Silver Jubilee
- Bogner Ecstasy
- Triple Rectifier
- Diezel Herbert
- Marshall TSL
- Marshall Major
- Marshall 1974X
- Marshall Super Bass
- Soldano SP77
- Dumble
- Peavey 5150 mk2
- ENGL Powerball
- Cornford 50mk2
- Marshall JCM900 4100
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A few are (I'd have to check the museum and studio to confirm) but most of those were on loan back then. Our whole "we must own an amp/pedal to model it" self-imposed rule is relatively recent.
 
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