IK Multimedia TONEX

[Sascha Franck]

Just a high cut and a bit of low cut. But in the tonex vst? Quite a bit of dancing around, especially for the high end.

The tonestack doesn't do it for you? It most often does for me.
But as said before, I agree, high and low cuts in the cab section would be nice.

 

[dean701]

it would be nice to have the cuts but depth and presence do a lot. Depth takes care of 120hz and presence adds/cuts spice.

 

[Sascha Franck]

My Pirate MIDI Pico is about to leave Down Under, should now take a week or a little more. Gotta say it's been quite a while that I've been awaiting a piece of kit that much.

 

[Dimiguitar]

The tonestack doesn't do it for you? It most often does for me.
But as said before, I agree, high and low cuts in the cab section would be nice.

It can get me some way to where I wanna be, but I often want to be more surgical. Especially with the high end. Matching some specific EQ moves with tonex tonestack well isn't as easy, if at all possible in some cases.

 

[Sascha Franck]

Regardless of several quirks IK has allowed to slip into their software, there's really a lot of things to love with Tonex.

but I often want to be more surgical. Especially with the high end.

Hm, typical high/low cuts on cab blocks aren't exactly surgical. In fact, usually not at all. The amp tonestack of the Tonex at least is a *lot* more surgical (and it's not exactly that, either, as the boost/cut range is pretty tame).

 

[synthpenguin]

I was going to try that next. I'll get time tomorrow to add some IR's/Cabs to the preset and turn them on/off. The only reason I'm thinking this may not help is that the tone model sounded great with my acoustic until I turned on a pedal model on my stomp.

The tone model I am using is @Deadpan LRS Acoustic 03 and it has a cab backed in already

LRS Acoustic Amp 03

TONEX Tone Model sharing community

www.tone.net

I can't try that capture right now, but if the IR / "cab" is designed to model an acoustic guitar, it may not be filtering out the high end like a speaker would. This can be good for clean(er) sounds, but might be pretty bad with overdrive pedals. When running into your guitar speaker, you're getting the guitar speaker's frequency curve on top of this capture, and that's rounding things off, whereas that's not happening with a PA speaker etc that is giving a more neutral response (or at least one with a lot more high end, and usually low end too).

If you want to keep the capture as it is, and don't want to add a guitar speaker IR on top of it (e.g. with the cab block in Helix), then yeah I'd either use a drive pedal block that can cut quite a bit of high end (and possibly some low-end too), or introduce a high cut after the Tonex that toggles on when you toggle the drive pedal. I'd try setting that high cut as low as 5 to 7kHz even.

An alternative approach would be to switch to an entirely different Tonex capture for driven sounds, like a normal guitar amp one. Choosing an amp that doesn't have a big mid scoop or too little low end could help with the transition between the two sounds. A round full sound. I'd maybe even look at a tweed type thing, or like a Benson Chimera capture (Amalgam has some free amp + cab Benson captures on Tonenet that you can try), or AC30 normal channel.

 

[Dimiguitar]

Regardless of several quirks IK has
Hm, typical high/low cuts on cab blocks aren't exactly surgical. In fact, usually not at all. The amp tonestack of the Tonex at least is a *lot* more surgical (and it's not exactly that, either, as the boost/cut range is pretty tame).

What I meant by “surgical” (maybe not the best word) is that with a high cut, I know exactly where the cutoff starts — it’s a blunt tool, but at least predictable.

With the Tonex EQ stack, the Treble range feels pretty limited, and the Presence control doesn’t specify what frequencies it’s actually affecting. I'll probably ask IK, but didn't have the best results fudging with it.

But with a high cut, I can just use my typical settings and know where my high end tops out for a given tone and context. Similar stuff I always do with other units.

On the low end, at least Tonex gives you a lot more usable range: that's better than the perceived high end issue, I think.

 

[Sascha Franck]

the Treble range feels pretty limited

Hm, along with the frequency knob I think it's pretty effective.

On the low end, at least Tonex gives you a lot more usable range:

It's actually the same as with the treble knob. Just for lows.

 

[Dimiguitar]

Hm, along with the frequency knob I think it's pretty effective.

It's actually the same as with the treble knob. Just for lows.

Treble only goes up to around 4000, right? Thereabouts. Something like that. I think we don't have control after that, minus the presence knob, which I'm not sure what frequencies it affects.

But bass knob can be set fairly low to target frequencies usually problematic to me. So that's less of an issue. Can mostly get rid of mush. But the high end, that's been harder, especially for the big tones I typically go for.

That's why it's an issue for me. There's workarounds, but they are less convenient.

 

[Sascha Franck]

Treble only goes up to around 4000, right?

Yes. And it seems to be a shelve EQ with very low Q (probably just around 6dB per octave). So, while it's not a cut but a shelve, it's pretty similar to, say, the high cut of the HX cab block, the main difference being that you can as well boost.
I'm actually not sure what you're usually doing with frequencies above 4kHz, because typically there's little information. All one usually does is to apply a high cut.