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By heck.... Mix E in the guitar-only section sounds GASH..... Haven't watched the full thing yet...
TONEX PEDAL ...... MAJOR FREE F/W UPDATE ..... Nov 2024
- Thread starter BenIfin
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By heck.... Mix E in the guitar-only section sounds GASH..... Haven't watched the full thing yet...
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Right yeah.... fuck.. something really wrong there Nathan. I've never gotten anything THAT low-gain and shitty sounding from ToneX. How are you getting that??? Sounds like whatever signal is going into the amp is way too low????
STL sounded good, and Tonocracy sounded good. Real amp and NAM obviously the closest pairing.
STL sounded good, and Tonocracy sounded good. Real amp and NAM obviously the closest pairing.
![[Nathan]](/data/avatars/m/0/613.jpg?1726885163){kind=avatar}
[Nathan]
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It’s the same reamp chain for all of them, identical. ToneX is super hit and miss when it comes to actual high gain, to be fair this is one of the bigger misses, but even a hit is still worse than the competition imo
I have some theories and observations but the simple truth is that a boost pedal into an amp for a high gain tone is always worse on ToneX than the rest in this video. If you do more boomer high gain or lower stuff its generally fine but for my usage its always lacking.
One of the observations I and other people have is that there’s some arbitrary gain threshold. If you keep your tone tame to a point it’s fine, when you cross that threshold and go higher gain it starts to go backwards and fart out like in my video here. I’ve tried to figure out where that arbitrary line is and it’s inconsistent.
My takeaway is everything else works with no hassle, why is tonex different/worse? I don’t have the mental energy to figure out the quirks of ToneX to get tones that work as expected from the NAM family. Happy for others to use it but I’ve dumped way way way too many hours into it and it’s just not for me. I’ll checkout a tonex2 or updated tonex if they seriously fix things. Until then I’ll generally pass on that tech.
I also have a suspicion others doing high gain packs purposefully undergain their tones for packs because they know about the arbitrary threshold as well. I also think some people are doing double captures like HW was doing for kemper. This is definitely not a “me” problem, people just under gain or don’t talk about it.
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Hmmmmmm.... I've definitely had to increase the input gain when saving captures. But I don't think I've ever had anything as low gain as your clip. I'm not disbelieving you though, ToneX definitely has issues with high-gain stuff, and boomer bend players definitely wouldn't notice it. Your clip is way more extreme than the stuff I've experienced though. Interesting.
BenIfin
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Hey Nathan !
Firstly, I just wanted to say what a great video in terms of content and presentation ... you described and demonstrated the problem very clearly.
B.T.W - I'm in Vic ? Yourself ?
In terms of the issue, I have no great wisdom to impart ..... have you perhaps contacted some of the other makers like Jason S or Amalgam to run it past them ?
Have IK ever responded ?
Its very strange that IK and all their "big brand packs" and stock Captures and other vendors have released a stack of high to very high gain stuff and they all "appear" to be fine (?) (?) (?)
To my limited rationale there can only be 2 possible scenario's .... (a) perhaps there is an as yet un-found quirk in your hardware that Tonex does not like ... although the other platforms were not fussed (?) ... or ... (b) others are somehow "adjusting" or "compensating" for the gain "loss" in some as yet undescribed or "un-transparent" way (?)
Another thought ?
Does this issue only occur with the Tonex Software playing back in your software/daw ?
Do the Captures you load into your Tonex Hardware Pedal sound right ?
All the best in figuring this out ..... if I were doing captures and getting these results, I'd be tearing the rest of my hair out :)
Ben
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BenIfin
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Yeah .... I know !! :) .... just thought I'd have to ask as Nathan said he had or was going to contact them.
BenIfin
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I've got you bolding ... my work here is done ! :)
[Nathan]
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I'm in Sydney :)
I've gone down this rabbit hole multiple times. IK took about 10 days last time and I tagged Peter on a forum and got a quick response after. By that time I'd done at least 40 advanced captures testing the boundaries of reamp OUT levels, loadbox IN levels, playback levels. All observe the same kind of end result where there's some arbitrary ceiling. I've tried to get through it multiple times and the more you push it the more it farts out. When you back off the gain to "high gain but tame" levels, its fine.... but if I go more caveman like I would on a real amp, a modeller or my NAM / Tonoc / Tonehub captures, it can't handle it.
I suspect theres some golden optimum levels or setup for this to be achieved... or maybe one of the many training options would work better than others... maybe amp/cab works better than amp only... or maybe amp/stomp is the best? It could be any number of things. I've tried so many and end up with the same thing. 2dor mentioned he's had the same mileage and so have a few other people I've spoken to... the quick and easy answer is to just undergain your amp to "reasonable" levels... Like if my gain patch on a 5150iii 50w is farting out at gain 4 then pulling it back to gain 2.8 will sound "better / more accurate"... gain on 4 is hardly insane levels but its above the ceiling I keep talking about.
I've sifted through tons of their high gain packs on the store and I can hear this arbitrary limit on 95% of the packs, all undergained. To get any decent mileage out of it you have to slam the input gain or add a separate volume boost and things start to sound ok. But when you're doing this you can't A/B the amp as it was, you just have to take their word for it. There's been 2-3 high gain packs which seem to have broken this mold and actually sound killer. I could probably email one of them and ask.
TLDR
Playback - If I desperately wanted to use a ToneX pedal and get the best playback possible of my tones. I'd capture a tame "high gain" tone and then run a boost pedal into a ToneX pedal, I think that would do the trick
Amp vs ToneX vs NAM - I dont have to make any of these concessions in NAM based capturing but we do in ToneX... ergo, something about ToneX is different / worse for high gain and people just dont talk about it.
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BenIfin
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Actually ... just another thought.
Before I bought my Tonex Pedal, I downloaded the free Tonex CS Version and I built 4 presets ... played them in my DAW via my RME UCX and Sonar .... sounded great .... totally convinced me to grab the pedal.
I got the pedal, copied the presets over ... boom .... they sounded like total garbage.
After a good deal of trial and error and watching varying and widely differing video's about setting the Input Gain / Trim "correctly" .... I decided to just use the Tonex Hardware Pedal on-board "meter" with my guitar .... from memory it has just 3 settings ... low, high and "even" ... I think "even" was the word that would flash up.
Set my Pedal Input Trim / Gain so really hard strumming didn't go over "even" and all sounded great
Anyway, just a thought.
Before I bought my Tonex Pedal, I downloaded the free Tonex CS Version and I built 4 presets ... played them in my DAW via my RME UCX and Sonar .... sounded great .... totally convinced me to grab the pedal.
I got the pedal, copied the presets over ... boom .... they sounded like total garbage.
After a good deal of trial and error and watching varying and widely differing video's about setting the Input Gain / Trim "correctly" .... I decided to just use the Tonex Hardware Pedal on-board "meter" with my guitar .... from memory it has just 3 settings ... low, high and "even" ... I think "even" was the word that would flash up.
Set my Pedal Input Trim / Gain so really hard strumming didn't go over "even" and all sounded great
Anyway, just a thought.
BenIfin
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[Nathan]
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Im talking to 2dor and there's some shared wisdom going around. I've always been greedy and wanted my boost pedal --> amp high gain stuff but maybe that's just too much to ask for. I did a EVH 5150iii blue capture with gain on 4-5 and it came out close enough to the amp. Came out a hair better on NAM but close enough in the grand scheme. Doing a capture now for the RED channel on gain 4-5 but no boost pedal.
My only motivation to get good ToneX captures is to share them around, I have no yearning to do paid packs or anything... its just so frustrating when there's some tech limitation. If Amp only with no boost is the rock solid answer then at least its something, so far so good we'll see how this comes out. If this works great then I'll go through a bunch of amps here over the weekend doing a few sanity checks.
My only motivation to get good ToneX captures is to share them around, I have no yearning to do paid packs or anything... its just so frustrating when there's some tech limitation. If Amp only with no boost is the rock solid answer then at least its something, so far so good we'll see how this comes out. If this works great then I'll go through a bunch of amps here over the weekend doing a few sanity checks.
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That would explain the disparity between our experiences - I rarely capture amps with pedals.
Maybe the boost has some filtering inside it that is removing information from the ToneX reamp audio and that is affecting the under the hood engine??
[Nathan]
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As we say in Australia... Who the fuck knows
2dor
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Yeah, usually gain & high-end give profilers a hard time. Rolling the high-end back when some profiles don't turn out right helps.
At least that's what too many hours of profiling (and white hairs) have lead me to conclude. NAM does a much better job at dealing with this and can be tweaked even further if you *REALLY* need that high-end in and also want a low ESR (higher accuracy).
ToneX is great for clean, crunch to some high-gain tones provided they're not too "hairy". Anything that's less polite, you need NAM.
Any Poitier in a storm, mate.Oh dear my good man .... it's Sidney
BenIfin
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Could it be possible that Tonex is optimized for Amp DI and / or Amp + Cab Captures but does not "like" Capturing Amps with a drive or boost in front of them ?
I wonder how a Capture of a very high Gain Amp DI or very high Gain Amp + Cab [with no boosts or drives in front] comes out in Tonex vs NAM ?
2dor
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I shot these today. Same amp settings. Reamped the NAM track, trained for only 200 epochs then did an Advanced ToneX profile.
NAM vs Tonex 1.7.5 hi-gain comparison (13 dBu) | ToneHunt
Direct profile I shot to compare my real Ceriatone Molecular 50W to NAM and ToneX. I used the same amp & settings to reamp & train NAM and ToneX back to back. Trained for 200 epochs: ESR is 0.009932 I reamped the same DI through the real amp, NAM profile and ToneX. Tracks are available here...
Ceriatone Molecular 50W (vs NAM)
NAM: tonehunt.org/2dor/8aac0604-f4ab-434b-83b1-91954c1acfd2
www.tone.net
I reamped the same guitar DI (me noodling around) through the amp, the NAM profile and the ToneX Advanced profile. You can listen to the tracks here (just use the same IR with all 3 of them):
111.33 MB file on MEGA
Stating the obvious but nothing's changed between NAM and ToneX. The same reamp chain is used, same amp settings etc.
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