Tuesday-evening April 12th

Special Line 6 User Group Meeting; Vetta

 

Go to page 9; Page 10 from several pages.

 

Shimmery and Belly like tones...

Q: I play a Strat and when you use the second or the fourth position on the switch and bring back the volume. Normally you would get this really cranked, shimmery, belly-like tone. But then they’re gone. So you have to crank up the high again to get that back. If you turn it back then you get the harsh midrange…

Darrell; Every guitar feeds the amp with a different sort of emphasis of frequency range. So if your guitar is naturally brighter, and I can completely understand why this update and the change to the EQ would become like OOOOHHH, kind of scary. If you bring it back to much I think you would find that you don’t have the shimmer in the same way, but then around 10 o-clock it should be almost exactly the old one.

 

Effecting the Direct Outs

Q: The EQ change also effect the Direct Outs?

Darrell: Actually it does effect the Direct Outs. I’ll tell you why. The master EQ block is before both off the signals that get send to speakers as well as the Direct Outs. It is effecting the overall tone. We’ll have to look it up if it effects the Direct Outs, but my understanding of the Block Diagram would let me state that it does. We’ll get back to you on that one...

This is our amp room at Line 6, this picture is taking a couple of years ago and this picture shows about half the amps we own right now.

When people talke about playing a Plexi Marshall, (while pointing it out at the photo), its because they originally had plexiglass logos on them. That, of course, is why they call them Plexis. We’ve got a couple of those, we’ve got a lot a really brilliant amps. Here’s a Vox AC 30 that’s actually never put in a model, it’s always the next one to get done. It came from Lenny Kravitz and previously Brian Adams got it.

More recently we’ve modeled a Diezel VH4 Herbert. The VH4 was Metallica’s. So to most oof the amps there’s a story. We’re kind of go out on our way to find the really great amps to model. Here in this picture you just see a few of them. I think we’ve got three Bassman’s  Of which is one The One and the other two just need to get sold or something..

Steve: Each amp has a story - if it’s owned by this person or that person, or if it has a history behind it,  is only important to us if it still sounds right, otherwise…  The deal with the three Bassman’s is one of the other two as Darrell described has some great history but… It has been modified and it doesn’t sound good so we don’t use it.

Darrell: Actually we do use it. We use it to test ToneCore pedals….

I also want to be clear that the heritage of the tone of Rock and Roll is something that we hope never goes away. We don’t dream of day where it’s all digital sounding and Craftwork or something, right? We celebrate the heritage. Part of what we have been doing in the industry is conserving that tone. Keeping a historical record of the tone that inspired Rock and Roll.

 

Modeling Line 6 Amps

Q: Where do the Line 6 models come in then? Because you have some special models that you’ve developed yourselves…

Darrell: Obviously, having access to all these crazy tools. It’s pretty hard to stop ourselves. Things like Chemical X for instance is a modified 100 watt JMP amp. Sometimes we got to these places where we didn’t feel that it accurately represented a particular amp well enough to really say: This is exactly like amp A, B or C.

Other thing like Agro are just a figment of our imaginations - I want to have a Fuzz pedal here or this there and it just gets crazy. So we are dreaming…
But I have to say that Any tone that we cook up of our own still will sound in the context of vintage tones.

I mean you just have to take Cab emulation off and listen to that directly to understand that that could be a cool tone in production but the guitar tone isn’t going there any time soon. We are quite, generally, really used to and satisfied with the heritage of tone.