just got home from playing two days live with my axe rig.
saturday night the soundman was harshing my mellow.
normally, i use a tech 21 power engine for one side of the stereo axe out, miced,
and send the other side of axe out DI to the console, and have the soundman return that side only to my stage monitor for stereo goodness on stage and DI signal strength to others requesting me in their monitors.
great unless the soundman doesn't dial it it right. my levels in the monitor return were all over the map. he set input gain too high at the console channel on the DI side so small variances in level i sent him became cosmic earthmoving chasms of inconsistency.
this morning i pulled my di feed to the board, and used that feed to plug into my mackie studio monitor, and miced that monitor
then i sent the XLR thru from my tech 21 to the board. my stage sound was consistent and way better, and the soundman still had a miced speaker (although mackie monitor speaker) and a DI to use and blend.
this evening the soundman was different, and a pretty sharp kid. i walked him through the axe's sound effects and he was trippin. i'm still amazed by
the memory man, pcm 70, 2290, and echoplex/MM patches i have. i have a blackfaced clean i love although not because it's identical to a twin or deluxe.
i'm still on the fence about low/mid gain tones. i can get them to sound nice but they don't behave like the amps in question.
at home i use my carol ann OD2r for practicing and tone tweaking with my delays and pedals, and the thing i notice is the real OD2r has a deeper percussive analog layer the axe doesn't have, and i can roll down the volume on my guitar to take off the edge and it gets clean but more important it tracks the volume knob more linearly and smoothly. not so with the axe. the axe cleans up too but the tone gets muddier and feels plastic/gated by comparison, like some part of the signal path is getting robbed of headroom too quickly. it's just weird and i rely on that aspect of my guitar tone so much.
the moral is fragile harmonics cannot survive in a crystal lattice.
