It’s been a well known thing since launch that Tonex captures don’t always come out right, often requiring a severe gain and sometimes treble change (sometimes without the treble change being within the range of tonex’s actual controls).
Now a year or two later, it seems like there are more than a few great captures out there, but still little hints on how to do this right.
I know personally it seems like if I have the input hitting the first red during capture, the gain knob can’t be turned up hard enough to make the gain similar. I wonder if making the input level much lower in the capturing process would help but the damn training takes so long it’s almost not worth it to try
Anyone know the real tricks?
I've done quite a few but more NAM recently - the gotchas though are somewhat similar.
If you have a reamp box, I recommend folks look at the Lehle P-Split III or the Signal Art, you should be able to squeeze some pretty good profiles provided you put a little bit of time into gain-staging / calibrating your signal chain.
I usually recommend folks skip over the "don't clip the red" on ToneX' setup wizard and instead do their own calibration. The simple way to do it is as follows (it can get a lot more technical but you'll get good results this way too
1. On your audio interface set all your level sliders at unity gain. Very important to ensure your instrument input's physical knob or gain slider all the way down. So, keeping it a unity gain
2. In the DAW of your choice, generate a sine of your choice; I usually do a -12 dBFS @ 1000 Hz.
3. Route that sine through one of the Line Outputs and into your reamp box
4. Route the reamp box's output (so the unbalanced out with a TS cable) back into your audio interface INSTRUMENT input
5. Check the reading you see on the instrument input.
- If it's reading less than what you generated (so -12 dBFS to keep with the program) like -16 dBFS, try to use the pot on the reamp box to get the level right.
- If your reamp box doesn't have a volume adjustment pot, bump the sliders on your Line Out up / down (careful to not clip the converters) until you do.
- What you want to get on the INSTRUMENT input is the same dBFS value you're generating out through the Line Out
6. [Optional] Once you have this sorted, you can check your interface manual and look for "maximum input gain" on the Instrument / Hi-Z input - that will give you the dBu value your profiles are calibrated for - useful if you share them with other folks so that they can get the best experience playing through them
7. Launch the ToneX training & ignore anything that has to do with signal levels; it might throw a warning that you're tickling the first RED dot - ignore it.
8. Go through the training process & enjoy the profile
Having done a lot of profiles in the past years, I've noticed that the more gain / saturation & high-end your gear has, the harder it is for the profiling process to nail it. NAM isn't as succeptible as ToneX, Quad Cortex or Kemper but still struggles a bit to get the exceptional levels of accuracy it's renowed for if you throw tons of saturation & high-end at it.
What I recommend is folks also do AMPs separate from Boost pedals & compare against single profiles with both Boost + Amp.
Hope this helps.
