Re: Pickups and digital modelling amps...
It can be a delima- As everyone does, I've developed ridiculously complex pathches that don't work well in the real world, and I've barely tweaked others and have a sound for life- It's a lot like production, you can't tell if something works until you try it, but if you experiment all of the time you will never get anything accomplished-
With that said, I think there is a middle of the road that works rather well for me.
1. When I get a new modelign envirornment, the first thing I establish are a few core "base tones" good old every day tones that I can easily compare to others- The blackface I refered to is one of those and, usually you can find 99% of this in a preset. I usually set up a clean big fender, a lighlty crunched fender, a middle of the road driven Marshal, and a ridiculously overdriven something depending on the avaiable models.
2. I thin go back to these core sounds and assign affects and have used a midi footboard for 10 years, so I go ahead and assign the pedals- Now I have a basic fender crunch chorus sound as well as a marshal compressed, etc.
3. I forgot to tell you that I do this monitoring thoguth a very wide band, uncolored system- Now I use the studio, but in the old days I even used PA systems that had been well adopted to a room.
4. #3 is crucial, as you dont want to get too far down the road and say, this sounds terrible anywhere but in my bedroom. The farther you get away from the preset the better the chance you will be off.
5. And considering the above tends to take about a weekend, I make sure these core sounds are backed up and in banks that are easily accessible, and then I just use them for the next month or so- I may find that in one perormance envirnent that the basic patch is too thin, or has too much chorus, so I will save the 'local' equivielent of that patch next to the core patch-
6. After a month or so, I'll go back and see what I have. Often I will realize that I had saved 4 copies of core patch 1 with a 3db boost at 1200 and recognise that I can just adopt this edit in the core patch-
Or I will realize that a core patch simply isn't workign and go back and look for another version-
This works really well- I got a cheap yamaha digi stopmp a couple of years back for models and affects on accosutic, but I took the time to do basic electric patches as well and tested them just a bit in the real world-
About 6 months ago, I blew a mental gasket and thoguth I had my main rig in the car for a gig, and was tryingto figure out how to get it there in time when it hit me, I could just use the yamaha-
Of course it wasn't exactly teh same thing, but since I had similar core patches to work with, I was already in the ball park and I got to concentrate on the songs instead of technology that night
Good thread!
