Axe fx 3 tones!!! This thing is insane!

  • Thread starter Thread starter VESmedic
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@VESmedic dude check out the FAS models, especially the Modern models. I feel like they tend to get skipped over because of the novelty of using models of amps people are already familiar with, but they’re pretty excellent.

Modern 1 is Fractal’s “idealized” modern high gain tone.

Modern 2 is Modern 1 with a 5150 style depth boost added.

Modern 3 is Fractal’s interpretation of the idealized Recto.


They’re all great on their own. Put a GEQ on the grid in front of them for even more gain character sculpting and I think you might like what you can get. You can even get weird with the High Treble control on the “Ideal” tab for some extra control over the super high sizzly preamp frequencies. Go nuts with it. There are some killer tones to be achieved in there.
 
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TheGreatGreen said:
@VESmedic dude check out the FAS models, especially the Modern models. I feel like they tend to get skipped over because of the novelty of using models of amps people are already familiar with, but they’re pretty excellent.

Modern 1 is Fractal’s “idealized” modern high gain tone.

Modern 2 is Modern 1 with a 5150 style depth boost added.

Modern 3 is Fractal’s interpretation of the idealized Recto.


They’re all great on their own. Put a GEQ on the grid in front of them for even more gain character sculpting and I think you might like what you can get. You can even get weird with the High Treble control on the “Ideal” tab for some extra control over the super high sizzly preamp frequencies. Go nuts with it. There are some killer tones to be achieved in there.
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Yea man, I really need to dive into them. My homie @Dimebag11 is huge on FAS modern 2. It’s just so easy to get stuck on one model and play for days or hours. Pretty incredible. Much more satisfying than the kemper was to me due to having more control etc.


I think one things for sure though, I’m never using a load box again haha. They are just not right with real amps, they screw them all up. That warmth and bloom in the low end is something I can’t get with a loadbox, only with a real amp or this thing. It’s going bye bye for sure.
 
VESmedic said:
Yea man, I really need to dive into them. My homie @Dimebag11 is huge on FAS modern 2. It’s just so easy to get stuck on one model and play for days or hours. Pretty incredible. Much more satisfying than the kemper was to me due to having more control etc.


I think one things for sure though, I’m never using a load box again haha. They are just not right with real amps, they screw them all up. That warmth and bloom in the low end is something I can’t get with a loadbox, only with a real amp or this thing. It’s going bye bye for sure.
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Hah nice!

Gotta say though for me the reactive load isn’t going anywhere. Playing a cranked tube amp hard enough to hear the guitar physically ringing out in the transformer and getting all that at convenient volumes is just too cool to stop doing. :)

But yeah you could probably legitimately spend a lifetime in the Axe-Fx and still not have fully gotten every good sound out of it.
 
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my problem with my axe fx is that i can't control myself from fucking with EVERYTHING. like with the kemper i can fire it on, turn the dial to a profile i know satisfies me, might tweak eq a tiny bit, and good to go. I'm somewhat limited in options and that's good for me. The Axe I can waste hours playing around with shit and never actually get writing or recording done. It's definitely a "me" problem, not a product problem but it's a real thing and I'm not only person who's had this struggle haha.
 
VESmedic said:
Yea man, I really need to dive into them. My homie @Dimebag11 is huge on FAS modern 2. It’s just so easy to get stuck on one model and play for days or hours. Pretty incredible. Much more satisfying than the kemper was to me due to having more control etc.


I think one things for sure though, I’m never using a load box again haha. They are just not right with real amps, they screw them all up. That warmth and bloom in the low end is something I can’t get with a loadbox, only with a real amp or this thing. It’s going bye bye for sure.
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Which reactive load are you using? I sound like a broken record but the Suhr Reactive Load is as good as it gets. It has the real impedance curve of a 4x12 greenback cab and sounds/feels as good as a mic’d cab. Nothing else compares. My Axe 3 consistently lost shootouts against it with my real amps. It was like playing an amp in 720p resolution vs 4k.
 
Spaceboy said:
my problem with my axe fx is that i can't control myself from fucking with EVERYTHING. like with the kemper i can fire it on, turn the dial to a profile i know satisfies me, might tweak eq a tiny bit, and good to go. I'm somewhat limited in options and that's good for me. The Axe I can waste hours playing around with shit and never actually get writing or recording done. It's definitely a "me" problem, not a product problem but it's a real thing and I'm not only person who's had this struggle haha.
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I could 100 percent understand this for sure. And i think if I was an early axe adopter, I would’ve been in the Same camp, because it seems the earlier versions needed a ton of tweaking to get something you wanted.

I don’t feel this way with the axe 3 however. It is interesting because you and I are the same, but different haha. For me, the axe 3 with its algorithms and controls functioning exactly like the real amp it models ( for the most part), it’s much easier for me to get to where I want than with the kemper. It seems nowadays you don’t need to go down crazy sub menus with the axe to get the tones you are after. I tweak it like I would the normal amp it models, since many I’ve had real world experience with. And boom, I’m good to go. I had a parametric eq up front to mimic my beloved pepers dirty tree and I’ve got all the tones I could ever want and then some. With the kemper, I felt I was constantly tweaking much more due to the fact that the tones are based on someone else’s idea of what sounds good. Ex: how they mic their amp ( usually badly haha), how they eq it etc. again nothing wrong with the kemper, I used the kemper live for the better part of 7 years. I just prefer the axe greatly these days, and it was always the opposite, until now.
 
pipboy90 said:
Which reactive load are you using? I sound like a broken record but the Suhr Reactive Load is as good as it gets. It has the real impedance curve of a 4x12 greenback cab and sounds/feels as good as a mic’d cab. Nothing else compares. My Axe 3 consistently lost shootouts against it with my real amps. It was like playing an amp in 720p resolution vs 4k.
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I’ve used them all homie, I have the driftwood and it’s the best I’ve heard ( for me). My buddy sold his suhr the day after he heard my driftwood loadbox, take it for what it’s worth.


I dunno, I have a pretty decent ear, and a great monitoring setup, and to me the feel, bloom, and fatness and thickness to the tone of the axe 3 is much better than any loadbox and amp setup I’ve used. The loadboxes I think are great, I just think they really fuck with the amp in some way, regardless of the impedence curve. For instance, you can change the impedance curve on the axe 3, and I’ll match it with whatever IR I’m using. My jaw almost dropped. The IR’s just sound soooo much better with the axe than with a loadbox. This isn’t something talked about, as I doubt many are aware of it, but I believe it is a thing personally, and I’d love to learn more about it and why it’s like this.
 
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alund said:
Vesmedic what is the difference between axe2 and Axe3 versions in a live setting if you are using that way? If so what power supply or are you going direct into mains?
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Hey man, I am by no means a fractal expert, but as a whole, the fractals modeling has improved with every model and firmware model upgrade within the unit itself. I believe the new “Cygnus” platform is the biggest breakthrough in axe upgrades since around 2016 as far as modeling goes. The axe 3 has substantially more processing power, a lower noise floor etc.


As far as live use, I would think either would sound fantastic, there are many live bands still on the 2 and feel no need to upgrade to the 3. I think they are both probably incredible sounding units. But, the 2 is dead as far as software upgrades and support for it goes really, while the axe 3 apparently still has quite a bit of room left for development, firmware upgrades etc. just like with a computer, the newest version is always going to be better, be the most capable, and have the most support from the company when it comes to upgrades etc. that is one great thing about digital I think we forget: it’s basically 99.9 percent guaranteed that any new version of a product will always be better than the last, always. Technology is advancing and there is no way the successor to product A is going to be worse. Not always the case with tube amps: many amps successors are not as great as their original counterparts, of course that’s an opinion too.
 
I’ve played just about every digital modeler out there and tbh I’m not sure how you aren’t getting better tones out of an amp- I LOVED the way my axe fx sounded, but every amp I tried just sounded more 3d and detailed
 
VESmedic said:
I’ve used them all homie, I have the driftwood and it’s the best I’ve heard ( for me). My buddy sold his suhr the day after he heard my driftwood loadbox, take it for what it’s worth.


I dunno, I have a pretty decent ear, and a great monitoring setup, and to me the feel, bloom, and fatness and thickness to the tone of the axe 3 is much better than any loadbox and amp setup I’ve used. The loadboxes I think are great, I just think they really fuck with the amp in some way, regardless of the impedence curve. For instance, you can change the impedence curve on the axe 3, and I’ll match it with whatever IR I’m using. My jaw almost dropped. The IR’s just sound soooo much better with the axe than with a loadbox. This isn’t something talked about, as I doubt many are aware of it, but I believe it is a thing personally, and I’d love to learn more about it and why it’s like this.
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I have the Fractal LB-2 X-Load and it seems to do a good job of retaining the feel to me, and I am super picky about the low end bloom feel. However, I generally dont use it into IRs. I normally use it into a Matrix Poweramp to power cabs, in a reamping situation.

I have an FM3 and Axe II (Also had a Standard back in the day), and I think the biggest improvement in the III generation was the low end bloom. I always had issues with the feel of the low end in the II, but feels better in the FM3.
 
Spaceboy said:
there's some debate as to how accurate the Suh RL curve is.
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It would be an interesting experiment to buy a single greenback speaker from 12 or so different
dealers and then run a detailed sweep of each to compare. Bet we'd be surprised at how much variation there is.

Industry standard for that is going to be +/- 2dB at any one frequency point so you can imagine.
Also wonder where an RL sweep would fit in the mix.
 
As far as Axe-Fx amp tweaking goes, @VESmedic is right, you basically never have to go into the advanced sections anymore to get tones as good as the real amps can get. However, there are still two controls in the advanced parameters I will occasionally mess with just to give myself some options.

One is the Negative Feedback control that does what it says, it raises and lowers negative feedback, which itself controls the damping of the amp. Setting it really low gives you a kind of Mesa Recto poweramp vibe, where the amp sounds a bit more fully open and raw, and becomes slightly more scooped as lowering negative feedback (and therefore damping) makes an amp more heavily influenced by the impedance curve.

The other is XFormer Matching, which effectively makes the transformer larger or smaller. Beef it up to make the amp hold up slightly better under higher volumes. Shrink it to increase a bit of overdrive and compression, and touch sensitivity to make note attacks stand out more. Actually it kind of controls the ratio of transformer breakup to tube breakup in that way. Transformer breakup is raspier, and tube breakup is generally smoother.


Basically, over time the advanced controls in the Axe-Fx have moved from mandatory to entirely optional. So while they're by no means required to get a good sound, you can now use them to kind of design your own amp, in a way. Most actual real world amp designers take amps that already exist, tweak them a bit, and put that slightly tweaked circuit in a fancy new chassis. You can almost literally do exactly the same thing with the Axe-Fx's advanced parameters. Just about the only thing you can't do is add or remove additional tube gain stages within a single amp model. But there are ways to approximate that anyway like adding a tube drive pedal before it, etc.
 
A few more tones:

This is with some different IR’s, Marshall BV 57/421 mix. Sounds thick as all fuck to me. Recto 1 modern again on the axe 3.

https://on.soundcloud.com/1fRfgKuSk43mN5dE9


A general 5150/sneap kind of tone, with an IR that may or may not be from sneap himself. Just an awesome straight Up 5150 tone. 5150 block model on the axe 3, boosted with an 808 “mod”.

https://on.soundcloud.com/uCDjZ1usJEfFaUEB8


Does anyone with an axe 3 feel like your playing is much cleaner/better than with other forms of amplification?
 
VESmedic said:
Does anyone with an axe 3 feel like your playing is much cleaner/better than with other forms of amplification?
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I always think the sound is much cleaner and clearer overall. Much more clinical. For me to get something similar with my tube amps, I have to use an OD, an EQ or 2, a Noise Gate, etc....
 
Shask said:
I always think the sound is much cleaner and clearer overall. Much more clinical. For me to get something similar with my tube amps, I have to use an OD, an EQ or 2, a Noise Gate, etc....
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Glad it’s not just me. It’s very apparent to me when I listen back and compare. Another strange phenomenon, but hey I’ll take it ?
 
VESmedic said:
Does anyone with an axe 3 feel like your playing is much cleaner/better than with other forms of amplification?
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Yes.

I've said before that I can get my Axe-Fx 3 to sound as good as my tube amps, but not exactly the same. Part of that dissimilarity is that the modeler usually sounds slightly crisper and and less messy. I mean it's VERY subtle, like a 1% difference or whatever, but it's still there if you squint hard and listen.
 
I have a buddy that owns one and it sounds great! Endless tweakability and lots of fun
 
tallcoolone said:
Love the Atomica! Don’t forget the Splawn either. Not a fan of the way the real QR feels under the fingers but the AXE version is killer.
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other than feel, do you find that the quickrod on the axefx sounds about the same? its one of my favorites and is making me consider a real one.
 
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