IK Multimedia TONEX

Chocol8 said:
Uh, WAY better point!
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haha honestly, watching a video on the new editor is the only thing that made me seriously consider it again! I'm not super interested in spending a lot of time chasing different captures, I mainly just want a few good sounds and a few specialized ones, but even then it seemed like such a chore before.
 
Picked one up last week, did the firmware update, I'm rather impressed with it..I integrated it into my pedalboard and it works and sounds great as a stereo rig for live streaming ... Got a clean Fender sound, a JCM 800 for the crunches, and an SLO for the heavies, been using a real SD-1 to goose the front and haven't had an issue with clipping...
 
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jimmy Biter said:
Picked one up last week, did the firmware update, I'm rather impressed with it..I integrated it into my pedalboard and it works and sounds great as a stereo rig for live streaming ... Got a clean Fender sound, a JCM 800 for the crunches, and an SLO for the heavies, been using a real SD-1 to goose the front and haven't had an issue with clipping...
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Tonex seems to handle pedals in a way that feels more consistent with my tube amps. I love having it on a board. You can pull a ton of really great tones with a couple presets and a few drive pedals.
 
Got the Tonex today, and I only messed around with it for about an hour, and without hooking it up to the editor or anything yet, but I like it a lot! I did find a lot of the presets pretty bright for the guitar I was using, but I found some I liked quite a bit in there (some of the Fender captures sound great). I'm looking forward to grabbing some of the Amalgam captures and a couple others!

Re: input trim and clipping. I didn't seem to have any trouble with clipping with passive humbuckers or single coils. The only pedal I tried through it for now was a fuzz that isn't actually boosting the output much anyway, but it was fine. Though is there any visual indicator for actual input clipping? I thought I saw people say there was an LED or some sort of on-screen indicator before, but maybe not.

And on the input trim, I messed around a little with the oft-suggested 0dB and +6dB settings, but for now I'm pretty happy with the +8.5dB default. My single coils responded like single coils, and my humbuckers acted how I'd expect relative to that (I prefer that to every pickup hitting the captures the same). A few of the presets seemed a little hot for their description, but most didn't, and turning the gain knob down a little was nbd when they did.

Also, the reverb sounded better than I expected or remembered from the demo, which was a cool bonus.

Anyway, I'm happy so far! I'm excited to hook it up to the software later.
 
Connecting to the editor and all that was smooth sailing. The editor is very easy. The only thing I don't like is that I have to replace entire presets to try out captures; I wish you could just import the captures from a preset.

Anyway, haven't bought anything yet, but tried plenty of free sample presets from people who make premium ones, and so far my fav has been a driven Bassman from Amp Gems (I think it's actually a Synergy BMAN preamp in a Syn30 head). It's a direct capture that I've been running through a G12H30 York Audio IR, and I really love how it cleans up and responds to dynamics. I also liked a cranked Princeton from Amp Gems and a cranked Vibroverb from Keemosawbe with the same usage + IR. I also tried a couple free Benson Chimera captures someone had uploaded, and those sounded pretty nice too.

Anyway, so far I'm enjoying using these cranked captures, and then fine tuning them a little with the gain knob, and controlling the rest with my guitar volume knob. I like that, because my plan is to figure out macros (looks like you can't set them up in the Editor..?), and then use it to attach gain to an external footswitch (or MIDI) as a lead boost, e.g. start with a capture that, with gain on 5, is around where I want to be for leads, then set gain to maybe 2 or 3, and use the footswitch to turn it up to 6 or 7. That's exciting to me, because ideally I'd like to find 5 or 6 captures I like a lot, and build a few presets like this around them, and then be done with it for the most part.

Thanks again for the help and advice, everyone!
 
synthpenguin said:
Anyway, so far I'm enjoying using these cranked captures, and then fine tuning them a little with the gain knob, and controlling the rest with my guitar volume knob. I like that, because my plan is to figure out macros (looks like you can't set them up in the Editor..?), and then use it to attach gain to an external footswitch (or MIDI) as a lead boost, e.g. start with a capture that, with gain on 5, is around where I want to be for leads, then set gain to maybe 2 or 3, and use the footswitch to turn it up to 6 or 7. That's exciting to me, because ideally I'd like to find 5 or 6 captures I like a lot, and build a few presets like this around them, and then be done with it for the most part.
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This is exactly what I thought Tonex did better than most other platforms: the ability to adjust the gain through a wide range on a single capture using the gain setting and/or guitar/effects volume.
 
Chocol8 said:
This is exactly what I thought Tonex did better than most other platforms: the ability to adjust the gain through a wide range on a single capture using the gain setting and/or guitar/effects volume.
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Yeah, I've been really impressed by this as well. When I initially demoed Tonex, I was comparing it to (the newer amp models in) the Helix, and I wasn't super impressed, honestly. I mean, it sounded good, but I felt it was kind of overrated haha (I think I posted about it here even). But using it more now, I really appreciate how it handles that range and, yeah, it really does just feel nice to play through too (which I don't think I fully appreciated when playing into the software through my interface, which might have been user error on my part).
 
synthpenguin said:
The only thing I don't like is that I have to replace entire presets to try out captures; I wish you could just import the captures from a preset.
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Okay, I figured out that you can do this through the Tonex Editor as long as a preset with the tone model / amp / cab you want is saved to your software library. Maybe obvious haha, but I totally missed how to do it the other day.

It's not quite as good as importing just the tone model to the Tonex hardware since it's still tied to the editor, but close enough for my case. I mainly just wanted to avoid having to import presets to slots on the hardware to demo different captures.
 
synthpenguin said:
And on the input trim, I messed around a little with the oft-suggested 0dB and +6dB settings, but for now I'm pretty happy with the +8.5dB default.
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I have my input trim at 0db. Not saying that’s “right” but is 8.5db really the default? I guess I naturally want to consider zero the default neutral point but that may not be the case. I’m gonna laugh if I’ve been undergaining everything for who knows how long.

winning charlie sheen GIF
 
Chocol8 said:
Didn't we warn you that the software isn't the most intuitive user friendly experience? :rofl
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haha you did!

I feel like so much would be solved by just cleanly separating tone models from presets, and providing an easy interface to manage them separately.. but oh well lol

EOengineer said:
I have my input trim at 0db. Not saying that’s “right” but is 8.5db really the default? I guess I naturally want to consider zero the default neutral point but that may not be the case. I’m gonna laugh if I’ve been undergaining everything for who knows how long.

winning charlie sheen GIF
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lol well my understanding is that the default used to be different, but at some point they changed it to +8.5 and I think it's what they recommend as a reference when testing captures (?).. don't quote me on that though, but +8.5 is definitely the default now, and how my new unit was set out of the box.

I think as long as it sounds good for your setup and playing, it probably doesn't matter though, especially since the gain knob does the same thing in practice anyway. I did 10 minutes or so of experimenting when I first got it, and haven't touched it since, and everything has been fine! I'm sure it would be at 0 too; I'd just probably be turning gain up more often lol

Having actually used the Tonex now, it does seem like something people maybe overthink a little tbh..
 
IMO the default is set to 8.5 due to the lower amp out on the IK interfaces.

EOengineer said:
I have my input trim at 0db. Not saying that’s “right” but is 8.5db really the default? I guess I naturally want to consider zero the default neutral point but that may not be the case. I’m gonna laugh if I’ve been undergaining everything for who knows how long.

winning charlie sheen GIF
Click to expand...
 
It seems to me that input trim only matters much if you’re trying to match the intended / listed gain level of a capture with Gain at 5. Amalgam, for example, directs you to use 8.0 as a starting point for single coils and 0.0 as a starting point for humbuckers with their captures.

So far for me and my gear—and yeah I’m still new to Tonex—I’ve been happy with leaving it at the default (8.5) for single coils and humbuckers, and just adjusting Gain on a per capture / preset basis and forgetting the input trim. I’m still new to Tonex though, so maybe that’ll change, and setting it to 0 as a neutral point seems to make sense too, especially if you’re primarily using humbuckers (I’m not these days)
 
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