Soon live with my Axe-Fx II

Hi again!

Now I have really started to get a really nice sound from the Axe-Fx II! It sounds smashing at rehearsals. It is really like playing an amplifier but the sound is clearer. I am not talking about the amount of gain here, it is enough! What I mean is that what I play comes across much better even when I use the heavy distorted sounds and with full band. The monitor is also working great. It is maybe not totally constant across the whole frequency spectrum, but it's really suitable as a guitar monitor. I mean you do not need a perfect sound in the monitor, you need to hear what you play! What is really nice is that it is really easy to get controlled feedback when using the monitor. YES!! :-D I thought that would be one of the things I had to sacrifice when moving from amp to simulator, but I was luckily wrong.

I have not used the unit live yet but next Friday it is time for the premiere. The gig is a small gig nearby so we use our own PA. The place is not built for band performances, but it works. We have played there before. It is one large oblong room with one smaller room on the side connected via a removable wall. We used the smaller room as our stage. Strange, but it worked really nice. It will work even better now when I take up much less space :-). I'm really exited about this and I'm really convinced that the sound will be awesome!

Okay, I leave you now with a video clip from a performance with my cover band Fire in the Basement. I really like the sound from my guitar here, quite on the edge of feedback every now and then. This is my ENGL Powerball singing :-D. It is for sale here and here now.

Rock on!

Merry Christmas!

Just wanted to wish you all a heavy christmas and a hard rocking new year! :-)

Almost there!

I've started to get really comfortable with the feel and sounds of the Axe-fx now. I have made some disappointing discoveries, but almost all of them was because I did not understand the unit good enough. As an example I did not get the delay spillover to work at first. I enabled it but it did not work. After some reading I found out that it was not enough to enable delay spillover, you also need to set spillover behaviour on the actual effect in order to get it to work. 

The only disturbing thing left now is that I still get a short delay when changing between some scenes. I don't like that at all. I would really like this switching to be instant without the short volume drop. I actually had the same problem in the "real" world with my ENGL-rig due to relay switching. But the volume drop during scene switching in Axe-fx is much longer, when it happens. When it does not happen the Axe-fx switching is seamless. 

I don't fully understand what couses the slow switching between certain scenes, but I think one candidate can be switching between A-B Amp when changing scenes. A new firmware was released just recently so I upgraded the unit, but unfortunate the problem was not solved. The struggle goes on...

I have to go to bed now, so happy trails and see you later!!

Rock on!

Not dead!

Hi!
I just wanted to say that I'm still alive! I have been fully occupied with normal life stuff like home improvement, sickness etc. I've been rehearsing normally with my bands, but there has been no additional time for practice at home and improving my Axe-fx setup. Actually I have been using my old rig for rehearsals for a while. The idea was to improve the Axe-fx settings at home during this time. I have drastically improved the settings, but I need some more time to finish off the fine printed stuff. But now I have ran out of time...  I will put out my old rig for sale shortly, so then I have to start using the Axe-fx actively again. You can fiddle around with this unit forever, so maybe it's time to say good enough and start to use it :-)

Please feel free to comment my posts! I still feel that I'm sending out messages into the void. Some feedback would be nice :-)

Rock on!

Axe-Fx II rig to the test

Hi there!
Long time no hear...
Now I have finally tested the new rig with our PA in rehersal a couple of times. I've spent the summer playing around with the unit and I set up the sounds using head phones at home. I can only say that the sound was totally different in the PA then in the head phones. The sound in the PA where much harscher and brighter. I also bought a fairly inexpensive active wedge monitor just to be on the safe side when it comes to hearing my own sound on stage and to be able to get my sounds with controlled feedback :-). It's a Laney CXP-112.

The Axe-Fx II sounded really good in this monitor. After just playing around with the Axe-Fx for a couple of hours I got a much better sound in the PA. I will continue to fiddle around with the settings to get an even better sound and search the Fractal Audio forum online for some insight.

Rock on!

Fractal status

Hi!

Here's a little update on my process of changing rigs. Unfortunately I have still not been able to rehearse or gig with my new rig, I'm still using the old one. So why? Well, time has been the problem. I have not had enough time to setup the Axe-Fx the way I want it. There has been too much at work and I also had another gig that needed a little preparation on the musical side. Not much, but the time I had available for it was not much. I needed to learn some new songs and to brush up on the old ones as well and as you know, time flies when you are having fun. But now I have no gig with any of my bands planned for the near future, so I can take some time to fix my sound on the Axe-Fx. One thing I'm planning to do as quickly as possible is to cell my old rig. With the old rig gone I must put some time in finishing the sounds for my new one. Otherwise I will not be able to rehearse...

Rock on!

New rig decision

Hi!

I left out to tell you that I made the choice to replace my current ENGL-rig with a Fractal Audio Axe-Fx II and a MFC-101! After fiddling around with the Axe-Fx for some time I found it to really sound good and have almost no limitations with respect to my needs for effects. Really complex, but still easy to operate and configure. The MFC-101 was also very versatile and went hand in hand with the Axe-Fx in a really nice way. 

So, now it's time to engineer my set of sounds I use and then try it out at rehearsals and live.

Rock on!