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Official Axe-Fx Q&A thread!
- Thread starter JohnIce
- Start date
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- amp audio axe axe fx axe fx 2 axe fx axe-fx axe fx ii axe-fx 2 axefx axefx 2 blocks btbam crown djent dustie waring fractal gear guitar isp mackie hd 1531 matrix amplification mesa mfc-101 midi amplifier switching midi controller misha mansoor peavey 6505 plus pedal chain prog qsc qsc k12 qsc k153 rig strymon
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Eclipse
Well-Known Member
What's the best pedalboard for housing a Fractal MFC?
For example. I would need space for the MFC pedal and two Mission Engineering Expression Pedals. (SP1 and EP1) One on each side of the MFC.
Looks like this:
Mission Pedal Fractal MFC. Mission Pedal
Thanks!
For example. I would need space for the MFC pedal and two Mission Engineering Expression Pedals. (SP1 and EP1) One on each side of the MFC.
Looks like this:
Mission Pedal Fractal MFC. Mission Pedal
Thanks!
olli576
Active Member
Had my first play with an Axe-fx II yesterday! I played through a mates cheap pair of monitors
At first i wasn't really impressed at all and i straight away noticed a strange frequency in all the high gain amps, Has anyone else noticed this? :/
After about 5hrs i was fairly happy with the patch i was working on but not AMAZED
Was really hoping to be blown away by this thing, been looking forward to playing one for sooo long, It might've been the cheap monitors or my lack of experience tweaking on it that put me off but yeah!
EDIT: I also noticed i found it reallyy hard to get even a half decent noise-gated tone when blending two amp heads and the axefx picks up guitar noise (floyd springs etc) ALOT more! was i doing something wrong? o:
At first i wasn't really impressed at all and i straight away noticed a strange frequency in all the high gain amps, Has anyone else noticed this? :/
After about 5hrs i was fairly happy with the patch i was working on but not AMAZED
Was really hoping to be blown away by this thing, been looking forward to playing one for sooo long, It might've been the cheap monitors or my lack of experience tweaking on it that put me off but yeah!
EDIT: I also noticed i found it reallyy hard to get even a half decent noise-gated tone when blending two amp heads and the axefx picks up guitar noise (floyd springs etc) ALOT more! was i doing something wrong? o:
What firmware version was the Axe-fx?
Since firmware 9, the buttons on the amp simulations behaved almost exactly like the real ones, and with firmware 10 theyre spot on. So 5 hours to set up a patch sounds extremely weird to say the least. Dialing in a good sound shouldnt take longer than dialing in the real amp.
Perhaps power amp simulation was disabled if it is set up to go through a power amp and cab live.
Anyways, getting a usable/good tone on a firmware 9-10 axe-fx should take minutes, not hours.
^ this 9-10 has made it much easier now even with controls at noon a lot of the amp models sound really good now.
cheap monitors will help ruin the experience...............for sure
Fixed for the sake of clarity.
olli576
Active Member
v10 Firmware!
I'll actually ask him if he had power amp simulation turned off cos he does run through a powerball and cab i'm pretty sure, plus when we were playing around with the patches they were really quiet unless cranked and by then the axe was peaking :/
the chain i had if anyone is wondering was: gate - overdrive - gate - compressor - 5153 red + 6160 II - boutique 2x12 - param eq
If the poweramp simulation actually was disabled, what kind of difference would it have made if it were on? like would the amps sound actually better or just louder?
EDIT: turns out the poweramp sim was indeed off
v10 Firmware!
I'll actually ask him if he had power amp simulation turned off cos he does run through a powerball and cab i'm pretty sure, plus when we were playing around with the patches they were really quiet unless cranked and by then the axe was peaking :/
the chain i had if anyone is wondering was: gate - overdrive - gate - compressor - 5153 red + 6160 II - boutique 2x12 - param eq
If the poweramp simulation actually was disabled, what kind of difference would it have made if it were on? like would the amps sound actually better or just louder?
EDIT: turns out the poweramp sim was indeed off
Poweramp sim will make a huge difference. Glad you solved the mystery
Poweramp sim effects tone different from amp to amp. I.e. older Marshalls get their distortion from the power amp section. So it's not easy to say exactly how the poweramp effects the tone, but most of the time when people talk about an amps sweet spot, they talk about the point where the master volume has been increased enough for the power amp to kick in
If you have a second go at the Axe i recommend the following:
- Start out with a simple amp-cab layout. No dual amps or fx gallore.
- While choosing cab sim, try running in stereo and pan both cabs to center
- Choose cab sims from the new list of mix packs "I like to combine the John Petrucci cab mix + one of the Kalthallen V30's"
- Pick an amp sim you're familiar with, adjust master volume to taste and the use the level parameter to even out volume (Master volume affects tone from the power amp, level is just loudness/volume, which means you can have a kranked amp without going deaf).
Once you get a good sound this way you've got a good basic platform from which to build more complex patces, just remember to start simple, every human must learn to crawl before they can walk
olli576
Active Member
Poweramp sim will make a huge difference. Glad you solved the mystery
Poweramp sim effects tone different from amp to amp. I.e. older Marshalls get their distortion from the power amp section. So it's not easy to say exactly how the poweramp effects the tone, but most of the time when people talk about an amps sweet spot, they talk about the point where the master volume has been increased enough for the power amp to kick in
If you have a second go at the Axe i recommend the following:
- Start out with a simple amp-cab layout. No dual amps or fx gallore.
- While choosing cab sim, try running in stereo and pan both cabs to center
- Choose cab sims from the new list of mix packs "I like to combine the John Petrucci cab mix + one of the Kalthallen V30's"
- Pick an amp sim you're familiar with, adjust master volume to taste and the use the level parameter to even out volume (Master volume affects tone from the power amp, level is just loudness/volume, which means you can have a kranked amp without going deaf).
Once you get a good sound this way you've got a good basic platform from which to build more complex patces, just remember to start simple, every human must learn to crawl before they can walk
Thanks mate, yeah i started out fairly simple but I was tweaking the same patch for over several hours haha
would the poweramp sim being off be the reason for the lack of tightness in the amps/ridiculous amount of guitar noise coming through aswell? I'm not sure when i'm going to be able to have a try at the axefx again which sucks haha! now i'm happy that there's more to it than what i heard but bummed that i haven't been able to hear it at it's real potential
Weimat01
Well-Known Member
I just got a pair of sennheiser TR130 wireless headphones given to me with two (red and white) RCA connecters on the end. Can I plug them into the S/PDIF in/out on the AXE FX II to use them or won't that work?
DestroyerD
Well-Known Member
does anyone have a preset for firmware v10 that is like the acacia strain guitar tone? thinking wormwood or death is the only mortal. any help would be nice. i cant dial it in =/
baptizedinblood
Z̶̭̠̻̳̲͗̎̾͒͛̃̒ͭ̚͢
Try blending a 6505 with a dual rec.
noob question but what is the best/cheapest way to connect my imac to an Ultra? I've been looking at midi to USB cables and reading a lot of reviews saying the drivers don't work on mac anymore and they can't find new drivers, or that there are other problems. I don't want that. At the same time I prefer to avoid spending $50ish for a proper midi interface that is only going to be used when I run axe-edit
getaway_fromme
Well-Known Member
This has been covered MANY times before. Search the thread
flint757
Well-Known Member
I used the UNO (I think that's the name), but I have no idea if it works on Mac's or not.
Cool. I was looking at that. A lot more expensive than the $6 USB-Midi cables, but M-Audio makes sure their stuff WORKS and keeps the drivers up to date so it's probably worth it to avoid constant headaches. I still want to look into something else... which is if I can use the midi keyboard controller sitting on my desk as both a midi router (it takes USB from the comp but has midi ins and outs) and to control parameters on my settings... it would be great to set it up so that all the knobs and sliders are used for EQ, gain, output level, FX, etc. If I succeed at that I will definitely be reporting on how it was done!
Another nooby question... digital out vs. analog out? I am going into an Ensemble w/ an iMac w/ 8 gigs of ram so I think both will probably have good results, I just imagine that skipping an extra stage of D-A followed by A-D would be preferable.
Another nooby question... digital out vs. analog out? I am going into an Ensemble w/ an iMac w/ 8 gigs of ram so I think both will probably have good results, I just imagine that skipping an extra stage of D-A followed by A-D would be preferable.
NVM this time I WAS able to find an answer quickly using the search function, quoted from Cliff at Fractal. This is the kind of thing my buddy was telling me about for why I want an expensive DAC for my stereo when using any kind of streaming (I haven't done it though... I listen to CDs through a good player most of the time and my mp3s are mostly 192 so I don't feel like it's worth it)... that basically the transmitting of the digital signal can pretty often be lumpy and degrade the sound. I'm guessing that the clock and SRC and all that on an ensemble are not bad but probably not as good as their A-D. Still seems handy for reamping if one doesn't want to use a reamp box! (Edit: oh yeah.. forgot about the line level inputs... no need for that either!)
"SPDIF sucks anyways. You get more noise and distortion due to clock jitter and cheap SRC chips than analog. Any Asian mixer is going to have the cheapest SRC chips that can be found and those typically have lousy distortion specs.
Staying digital would be desired in a synchronous system. However, in the OP's configuration the system isn't synchronous. The mixer is running at one sample rate and the SPDIF in must be matched to that rate. Even if the rate is the same (i.e. the mixer is 48 kHz) it's not synchronous and therefore requires sample rate conversion (SRC). In this case the SRC would, for example, be 48.001 kHz to 47.999 kHz. The point being the clocks aren't locked.
Once you put an SRC chip into the equation you start getting all kinds of potential nasties. First of all you have jitter on the recovered clock which will degrade the SRC performance. Then you have the actual performance of the SRC itself. No consumer or pro-sumer mixing board is going to be using, say a Burr-Brown SRC chip. Most likely an AKM or even worse. Add to that that most Asian companies don't seem to understand proper grounding and shielding and use the cheapest PC boards they can get away with and you have a recipe for PLL clock jitter in the SPDIF receiver.
A good SRC chip costs more than a good A/D. So if you go analog into a digital mixer at least you don't have clock jitter problems since the A/D in the mixer is running off the mixer clock.
SPDIF is so bad that the (I forget the name of the consortium, AC '97 perhaps) ruled in favor of abandoning the standard for modern computers. Yeah, it's convenient but the clock jitter typically degrades the quality more than an equivalent analog connection. On my PC here I have a SoundBlaster X-Fi and (to me) the analog inputs sound much better than the SPDIF input. So I use the analog.""
"SPDIF sucks anyways. You get more noise and distortion due to clock jitter and cheap SRC chips than analog. Any Asian mixer is going to have the cheapest SRC chips that can be found and those typically have lousy distortion specs.
Staying digital would be desired in a synchronous system. However, in the OP's configuration the system isn't synchronous. The mixer is running at one sample rate and the SPDIF in must be matched to that rate. Even if the rate is the same (i.e. the mixer is 48 kHz) it's not synchronous and therefore requires sample rate conversion (SRC). In this case the SRC would, for example, be 48.001 kHz to 47.999 kHz. The point being the clocks aren't locked.
Once you put an SRC chip into the equation you start getting all kinds of potential nasties. First of all you have jitter on the recovered clock which will degrade the SRC performance. Then you have the actual performance of the SRC itself. No consumer or pro-sumer mixing board is going to be using, say a Burr-Brown SRC chip. Most likely an AKM or even worse. Add to that that most Asian companies don't seem to understand proper grounding and shielding and use the cheapest PC boards they can get away with and you have a recipe for PLL clock jitter in the SPDIF receiver.
A good SRC chip costs more than a good A/D. So if you go analog into a digital mixer at least you don't have clock jitter problems since the A/D in the mixer is running off the mixer clock.
SPDIF is so bad that the (I forget the name of the consortium, AC '97 perhaps) ruled in favor of abandoning the standard for modern computers. Yeah, it's convenient but the clock jitter typically degrades the quality more than an equivalent analog connection. On my PC here I have a SoundBlaster X-Fi and (to me) the analog inputs sound much better than the SPDIF input. So I use the analog.""
Ok ONE more ( 
)
If I want to record wet/dry would a good way to do it to be to make one row completely dry and pan it's output hard right, and have the processed row's output panned left, then treat them as 2 mono signals going into my DAW (ie pan them both center and mute the dry signal)? The only issue I guess is not having stereo effects on the wet signal.
) If I want to record wet/dry would a good way to do it to be to make one row completely dry and pan it's output hard right, and have the processed row's output panned left, then treat them as 2 mono signals going into my DAW (ie pan them both center and mute the dry signal)? The only issue I guess is not having stereo effects on the wet signal.
Rap Hat
the:pawn.project
Ok ONE more (
If I want to record wet/dry would a good way to do it to be to make one row completely dry and pan it's output hard right, and have the processed row's output panned left, then treat them as 2 mono signals going into my DAW (ie pan them both center and mute the dry signal)? The only issue I guess is not having stereo effects on the wet signal.
You could do that, or maybe try using both outputs and having out1 be dry and out2 wet. This should let you use stereo for the wet mix. I have an Ultra as well but haven't really messed with multiple outs for recording. Mainly what I do is have out1 going into my FireFace800 via XLR and out2 going to my PA so I can get good feedback while recording/allow band jams to be recorded easily.
I would be using the digital out even with the jitter (as perfectly balancing XLR levels on the FireFace is nearly impossible - levels don't match with both FireFace inputs all the way down), but it's broken
. I got my Ultra used and the guy I bought it from had apparently abused the shit out of the inputs and outputs so the spdif broke within a month or so and now the front input jack is shorting out or introducing tons of noise unless it's perfectly still .I'm really not looking forward to having to buy a new one - it's a lot of money I don't have. Not sure if I can get it fixed either since it's so old now.
