Was going to call this a quick take but Craig Anderton over at Harmony Central is already doing a great job using that term for their quick video reviews of new gear.I'll be doing something similar for this stuff in the near future.
Now that things are moving along we'll have a chance to start programming tones for the HD500. Nailing hi gain tones for live use is perhaps the biggest challenge to model based guitar sounds. In the case of this first tone I wanted to see if I could ring out some of the characteristics common to John Petrucci's hi gain Mesa tones. If you've heard his use of harmonic feedback to punctuate the riffs on Dream Theater's “Endless Sacrifice" you know what I'm talking about.
Not easy to do with modeling so I was surprised to find that it's “in the box” as far as the HD goes.Have a listen to Hi Gain 1 to hear the HD treadplate amp model in action. Definitely the first time I've gotten that controllable response with a model. I'm playing a custom Carvin lefty bolt with a twinblade at the neck,
vintage strat mid and humbucker in the bridge pickup position.
The HD is pretty deep when it comes to tweakable program parameters and the HD500 edit software is visually pleasing and accessible.But we've been spoiled by plugins and DAW front ends that give us graphic representations for editing EQ curves, amplitude envelopes ,compression ,gating and the like. Line 6 fell maddeningly short of making a really nice product incredible as you won't find any of those features for programming the HD – with or without the HD edit GUI. On screen knobs and associated parameter values are not as enlightening as curves plotted against time, frequency or whatever other context dependent variables might be in play for your sound. Partially making up for this is the fact that there isn't anything else currently out there that can do what the HD does as well as it does at this price point. Our little quickie today is just to get this first example up. I'll be adding more detail about programming and parameters as we go.
Update Wednesday, September 19th, 2012
The folks over at Harmony Central have some friendly competition up now with a new Line 6 Pod HD Startup Guide by Neal Vanderhoof & Craig Anderton. Let's hope they expand and continue that track as their approach is truly helpful particularly to those utilizing this technology for the first time.The evolution of our approach here will be different in that I'm more concerned with bridging the gaps in the HD programming interface with tools that advanced users would have liked to have been there in the first place -those mentioned in the previous paragraph being an example. The basic idea not yet stated in the blog is thus : You can get pretty close -maybe sixty or even seventy five percent to the bullseye for a particular tone in mind within the confines of Line 6 Edit or the onboard edit interface but at fourth and goal you need to step outside those lines with outboard processing or DAW plugins.Recording your patch audio into your DAW gives you another tweak stage- the idea being that you find those final tweaks that get you to the target with plugins and then go back into the HD and see if you can duplicate those tweaks with editing in the box.Getting that crucial missing visual feedback with your plugin GUI's outside the box might seem more complicated at first but eventually you'll learn enough to work around the features that Line 6 left out. That's the theory. It's going to take a bit more work to codify that in practice.
Cheers,
Tk.
