Tuesday-evening April 12th

Special Line 6 User Group Meeting; Vetta

 

Go to page 10; Page 11 from several pages.

 

Line 6 Tones Amps

Q: Wouldn’t it be obvious to have Line 6 have their own tones as well?

Darrell: Sure, and with Spiders we’ve done that. All Spiders have our ‘own’ tones in them. With HD 147 about half the models are Line 6 crafted amps. Even though we can create our own Clean tone it’s still Fendery… We will never get away from that. It’ll still be Voxy… because that’s our point of reference.

It’s like can you make a new color? The best you can do is find a new combination of ‘colors’ and give it a great name like Fuchsia, right. But at the end of the day it’s still a mix red and blue or whatever.

For example, there are limitations to analog circuitry that we don’t necessarily have to deal with in digital. For instance. The new high gain JCM model, that’s been around for a year or so.

 

Strechin' the Balls to the Wall

We found the JCM 800 that had been modified by Reinhold Bogner in his first year in the US, it sounded amazing. It was ridiculous how much gain this amp had. It didn’t squeal, it didn’t feedback with all sorts of strange, weird oscillating stuff, it was tight. The Reinhold mod was the only mod, so we started working on it and what we found on the amp was that the drive knob acted almost as a switch. It was off, then there was about a millimeter where there was a sound like kind of clean, then it was breaking up and then it was just Balls to the wall.

 

So we modeled that and played it, but that one millimeter clean sounded really cool. It was really bluesy and yet if you rolled back on your guitar volume it cleaned up to sparkling madness. So I said: Guys can we take that one millimeter and stretch it up so it’s like half of the drive control. So we did some tweaks and did that.

What we found was that there was an analog limitation to how he filtered the front end, in this whole circuit, was that when his drive control was down low, he was filtering a lot of high frequencies. That was just of how capacitors and pots and everything that’s in there is interacting, naturally in the analog environment.

We were able to turn that around. So that the high frequencies responses exactly like he intended it into the distorted range. But in the clean range it then started to go backwards, it starts opening up again. Now you can go down to something like 8 or 9 o’clock and roll back off on your guitar volume it this beautiful sparkly thing going on. Right if you open up and you go fully open and switch up to your neck position you’re in a full on lead sound. This is beyond the capability of analog circuitry. I think that’s more what you would see from us in our own signature tone.

 

Q: What model is this you’re talking about?

Darrell: I’m sorry I’m embarrassed to tell you that I don’t know how it got called. It’s on the new Flextone update it replaced the JCM, but it should be described as a high gain JCM 800 and it’s in the Vetta already.

 

Capturing what the amps is doing, not what a part does...

Q: You’ve said that other, competitive companies would go in and take all the parts out of the amp and model that and put them in chain. This is something that Line 6 doesn’t do that way then? And have you checked to do it that way?

Steve: Yes, we checked and we don’t do that anymore. We tried that. We feel we moved beyond that.

Darrell: It captures a tone and it’s not necessarily a bad tone…. But it’s not what the amp is doing.