First impression

Hi again!

After unpacking the Axe-Fx and reading the quick-guide included from G66.eu, I hooked up the unit together with the MFC-101. Since we have a puppy in the house that needs supervision, I had to invade the office upstairs.

The sound system in this office is worthless. But this room is okay anyway since I can use my headphones, which is altogether a much better solution due to the late hours of testing :-)

Since the people at G66.eu already have configured the MFC-101 and the Axe-Fx for me it was very easy to get the system up and running. The only problem I had was with the expression pedal, it did not work at all. I used one of guitar chords to connect it to the MFC-101. After doing some reading in the manual (!!) I found out that you must use a TRS-cable, i.e. stereo cable, so that was probably the cause of the problem. I will buy a short TRS cable today and then it will probably work just fine.

I played through all the presets, all 383 of them!!! Turning effects on and off for every preset and listening. It was a tough job, but someone had to do it! After this I realized that you can build a huge variety of sounds with this babe. Normal and very natural sounding sounds can be accieved but also very complex and spacey ones. The effects sounded really nice but the crucial question to me was, can it really simulate a tube amp sound with the accurate playing feel? If it cannot do that I will keep my ENGL Powerball amp, so it better! The amps in the presets where nice, but non of them really delivered that slightly compressed sustain and fat mid tone for solos that I get from my Powerball. So the next step was to investigate the amp section further.

I tried some of the 83 amp simulations and looked at all the massive number of parameters that existed for each amp and fiddled with some of them. When I selected an amp it sounded rather good from start, but more nice then kick-ass-angry! Could the rest of the parameters provoke the amp in some way? Well the only way to find that out was to get an understanding for what the parameters did and try it out. So then I shut the thing off, grabbed the manual and headed outside in the Swedish summer with the dogs and read!

To be contined.....