Getting The Best From Your Modellers

You may have been inspired by great demos online, persuaded by your favourite guitarist or developed a genuine need for some guitar amp modelling in your life and so you have gone and made an investment.  This blog post is not designed to make you choose between analogue vs digital solutions, there is another one for that and plenty online besides, but how to get the most out of whatever you already have.

Any of the things discussed in this blog post can be applied to any modeller from the last 10 to 15 years – not a huge amount has changed in that time so the advice is pretty universal. 

The Main Problem

The biggest issue with any modeller is also something shared by conventional guitar amps too – the speaker. Following the signal chain and micromanaging every step of the process is all well and good, but the final step is what changes the signal from an electrical one into vibrations in the air – this is what you actually hear. 

You could take the absolute best, highly customised, hand-built amplifier in the world but, if you run it through a bad speaker, the sound you expect and have paid for will simply not be there. The same is true for modellers, but there are a few extra points to consider here – are you going directly into the PA? Are you using the FX return of an amp or somehow running into a guitar cabinet? 

If the PA speakers are not up to standard, then you are going to have a subpar tone and, as with the hand-built amp example from above, if you are running into a guitar cabinet that does not deliver the goods then you are on the wrong path. 

Let us think about some solutions, and perhaps why maybe those fixes defeat the purpose of going down the modelling route also. 

Making Yourself Heard

There is not much you can do if the house PA system is not very good, so one option is to not rely entirely on both the main speakers and the monitoring system. So, the first step, and this applies to home use also, is to make sure you have access to a speaker that you like. This could be one of the following:

• A guitar cab that you know and love,

• An FRFR speaker that is designed for modellers,

• The Laney solution that acts like a hybrid between the first two.

Of course, if you are on this pathway in order to save space or lighten your load, any of these ideas take you straight back to dragging along a normal guitar amp again.

Once you have that out of the way you should then make sure that you have a good, solid choice of impulse responses (IRs) that you like. I would try to limit the number of different IRs that you use onstage, I always try to use one and maybe two throughout a whole show. You could try and make your own, but companies like STL Tones, Bogren Digital and Tone Junkie make them just as good as anyone else. A brief word of warning, try not to fall into the trap of having too many options! That is why I like the Bogren Digital products, because they use seemingly random names and make you use your ears instead. 

Other Things to Try

Try to be more experimental with building patches, you do not need to always treat them like an actual guitar rig, so you can try and use EQs, high-pass filters and low-pass filters with a heavier hand than you usually would in a recording studio. When I used the Line 6 Helix family of products, something I learned would be to add a compressor in a block at the very end of the chain, almost like you are mastering a track in a recording studio. 

It might also be a good idea to invest in a small pedal sized power amp in order to run through a normal guitar cab without any extra amplification. 

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was to play around with the presets, this could be patches built within a factory unit like on the Line 6 Helix, or amp/rig profiles for the Kemper Profiling amp. The chances are that whomever put those together has experimented with this significantly more than you have, so I would trust their judgement. You would do well to take a preset that you really like, and do one of two things, as discussed below.

1 – Check the deep settings and check what they have used and adjusted, how it affects the sound and what effects they use and where they use them in the chain. This is especially useful for building your own sounds from scratch,

2 – Take the preset and make fine adjustments, or change one thing such as the IR, substituting and using your own effects pedal, be it drive or modulation etc.

Certain guitars have a high output, and they tend to push equipment harder. If that is the case and this does not match the guitar used in the creation process you might need to change input gain or certain EQ choices. All of those points made earlier about making yourself heard, and how you can achieve that effectively, could also mean that you have to adjust certain patches in the output stage. I know that for the Kemper, many companies that produce different profile packs also include a version that is designed to be the same but without a digital speaker emulation, this does make things a little easier!

Final Thoughts

There becomes a point where a guitarist realises that there is always something to change about his or her tone. You have to think critically and weigh up the pros and cons. If you bought a modeller small enough to fit into your guitar case meaning you need to carry nothing else, then you are at the mercy of the backline or PA speaker system – can you live with the knowledge that the most critical component of your tone is out of your hands? If you are really handy with an EQ, and have good ears, you could try and smooth out any issues on the fly… those of us that have played extensively know that you do not always have that luxury!

Try not to get overwhelmed with the choice that is available, and if you have not already made a purchase, think about buying a second-hand unit so that you can try everything out first-hand without the risk of losing too much money.

If you take anything away from this blog post, it is that you can make anything work if you spend enough time with it, just try to keep it professional when something out of your control diminishes your hard work!