Modelling live...

paulmapp8306

Ive seen bands recently using real amps - where the FOH amp tone was rubbish.   Keys/Drums/Vocals fine, guitars ............. even the bass was indistinct and muddy - the guitars shrill, thin and distant.  I just think its the way things are mixed live a lot these days

jonnyburgo

Just get a big fuck off amp and stick a mic in front of it, too much obsessing these days. 

PolarityMan

Drew_fx;405154" said:

Danny1969 said:



Mic'ed up amp or Axe your hearing digital sims anyway at any gig running a digital desk, which nowadays is pretty much all of em. The EQ is a sim of a Pultec or similar, the compressor a sim of a Fairchild or whatever, the engineer can put a 4 x 12 cab sim on it even if your using one anyway. With todays stuff like  Waves Sound Multirack or Avids Venue consoles the whole gig is running on Plugins anyway. 

Personally I always think of the Axe being a problem solver for small gig's and budgets. I don't really understand why U2 or Metallica need em





This isn't an anti digital thread, none of that stuff you brought up is really relevant. A mic'd up amp going through a digital desk still sounds different than the Axe FX going through the same desk imho.



BTW, this was at the Scala. Not a small venue by any stretch. I've seen other bands there before like Mono and Boris for instance, and they sounded fantastic.



I dunno... it was odd. I was expecting huge guitars, and what I got was nothing you couldn't have done with a 1st gen modeller from the 90's. I honestly believe that. The drums and vocals were by far the best sounding elements.



Also AAL were crap, but that's a music thing...

When I saw tesseract I got the impression that some of the guitar parts were doubled on the backing, they sounded good but not hugely "live" if that makes sense. Thing is they were on the same bill as Devin Townsend who obviously uses backing tracks too and he didnt suffer from teh same impression.

I also think musically tesseract have alot of parts that balance clean arpeggios against distorted rhythm parts and imho this is really hard to get right live. If you give the distorted guitars the body they need to sound great it's really easy to completely mask the more subtle clean guitar.

Also +1 on AAL being shit musically.

chrispy108

Tesseract were pretty pants when I saw them too, far far too much on the backing track.

Meshuggah were all AxeFX and immense though. Don't remember AAL either way on that night really...

mike257

I think from a live sound point of view it's easier for me to walk up to stage and tweak my mic position or have the guitarist quickly adjust their amp controls than it is to bugger about with settings on a modeller. I've only had one band in where the guitars were all run direct with no backline (American metal band travelling light with Axe FX racks) and one guy had a great, really chunky but well defined tone but the other guy had a fizzy nightmare. Was made worse by the fact that because it was so lacking in clarity he needed it slamming in his monitors and still wasn't happy with what he could hear on stage. If he'd been running a traditional rig I'd have spent 5 mins tweaking his amp and pedals with him and solved the problem but as he had a stack of programmed scenes it wasn't practical to quickly make the changes on the night. Made my job much harder than it could have been for sure.

Clarky

it's all about prep.. I think too many rack users don't prep their tones for live use..

bedroom / low volume tones don't translate well to the stage..

mike257

guitarfishbay;404930" said:

Periphery are back to running cabs on stage because they said front row sound sucked for people too close to get the full experience from the PA which is usually either side of the stage. The cabs fill out the sound for people up close and centre.
.

Shouldn't be neccesary in decent size venues surely - anywhere big enough for the front and centre audience to be out of the main PA coverage should have lip fills on the stage to fill the gap. I've had centre fills in for 400 cap theatres when the main stacks/hangs have been too widely spaced for even coverage up front so I would expect it for any reasonably sized venue those guys would be playing!

Clarky

well.... "should have" and "actually has" ain't always the same thing. You never can tell how the venue goes about firing the noise at the crowd until you get there...

some places are great... and some ain't... and of course, some places are pretty shite..

no matter what, it's totally out of your hands...

Handsome_Chris

I'm borrowing a 4x12 for my AF2 sys.  I've got an audition next week and 1x12 FRFR wedges will not look metal enough. You just can't play Children Of The Grave through a 1x12 and expect to be taken seriously.

ThePrettyDamned

It's interesting.

I'm (as everyone knows) a massive protest the hero fan boy, and seen them live several times. I think, with the axe FX rigs they use now, they sound better than ever - but they don't really have a "huge" guitar tone, if that makes sense - it's a very vocal and rhythmical dominated sound (to my ears) despite lots of constant technical riffs. The bass is very important. Before, they had engl and peavey rigs iirc, and sounded great but complex chords were slightly mushed - something the axe FX does better than a high gain valve amp.

Same gigs, tesseract were playing and I totally agree with @drew_fx. They lacked the huge ballseyness that kind of music really needs, and riffs sounded like a pre recorded guitar, not a live amp. The intervals were at the same gig and I felt the lead tones were great but big heavy riffs less so.

But, flip that over, and trivium are now on axe FX and I never noticed anything lacking in their sound - they sound huge, punchy, very powerful - at download and London. It's quite a different sound to the techy bands above, very thick gain and lots of bass versus a more modded Marshall mid gain sound with loads of clarity.

Trivium also sounded huge with 6505 full stacks. Perhaps better, but I don't trust my audio memory enough to say to be honest.

Fiftyshadesofjay

ThePrettyDamned said:

But, flip that over, and trivium are now on axe FX and I never noticed anything lacking in their sound - they sound huge, punchy, very powerful - at download and London. It's quite a different sound to the techy bands above, very thick gain and lots of bass versus a more modded Marshall mid gain sound with loads of clarity.

Trivium also sounded huge with 6505 full stacks. Perhaps better, but I don't trust my audio memory enough to say to be honest.

Trivium are actually using Kemper and have been doing so for a while I believe. Don't know whether it had anything to do with the improved sound, could quite easily be they have a better sound engineer!

crunchman

If you do it right, I think FOH sound can be better with a decent modeller than with a real amp on stage.  I saw one band live 2 years running in the same venue.  First year the guitarist had a Marshall half stack on stage, the second year he had a Kemper.  The FOH sound was much better with the Kemper.

For me the problems with modelling are not so much in the FOH (if it's done competently) as what you hear on stage.  I've tried going direct a few times, and by all accounts the FOH was good, but I was struggling to hear myself on stage.

One useful trick I've worked out to see what it sounds like out front is to use the looper on my Timeline to record a loop and then go out front and listen to it.  With some of the volunteer sound people at our church it's really helpful to be able to go back to the desk and hear what it sounds like.

ThePrettyDamned

Fiftyshadesofjay;431074" said:

ThePrettyDamned said:





But, flip that over, and trivium are now on axe FX and I never noticed anything lacking in their sound - they sound huge, punchy, very powerful - at download and London. It's quite a different sound to the techy bands above, very thick gain and lots of bass versus a more modded Marshall mid gain sound with loads of clarity.



Trivium also sounded huge with 6505 full stacks. Perhaps better, but I don't trust my audio memory enough to say to be honest.





Trivium are actually using Kemper and have been doing so for a while I believe. Don't know whether it had anything to do with the improved sound, could quite easily be they have a better sound engineer!

Ooo apologies. I knew it was a modelling rig of some kind.

Their sound hasn't lacked - every time I've seen them, they've been astounding, both tonally and for sheer tightness of playing.

trolley

I saw Plini, BTBAM and Tesseract last night at the Academy 2 in Manchester.
 As far as I could tell, the only ones with real amps (Rectifiers) on stage were BTBAM - and they had the shittiest sound. Mind you, even the vocals were badly mixed. One of the merch guys confirmed that the others were using Axe FX into FOH - and Plini's sound especially was really good. And big.

arayadis

I love tube amps and I think you can not compare real amps with modelling ones but Metallica playing Axe Fx in all live shows.