I’ve always been a huge fan of Line6 and their acoustic modeling technology.  In my not so humble opinion, they have some of the most outstanding offerings in not only amplifier and cabinet modeling technologies, but in instrument modeling technologies as well.

I’ve played through and auditioned a number of their amplifiers from the simple Spider to the full on Vetta and loved the sounds they were able to produce.

I even use the Line6 GuitarPort as my direct PC interface for recording software.

I truly *LOVE* the ease and simplicity of that little red box for getting rock solid and truly stellar tones down on a track without having to deal with hundreds of pounds and thousands of dollars worth of equipment, miles and miles of cables and enough patches and interfaces to make the pope swear.

The gear box software has a lot of cool features for a learning guitarist that I don’t use.. but the online community and ability to download tone patches from the online section truly rocks.

Having said all of that.. I don’t gig with my guitar port.  It’s tied to my computer where I can sit down and “fiddle” with it to get the tones I need.. spend time to iron everything out just … right.  The Gearbox software for the GuitarPort is like the ocean.. very accessible and easy to swim in.. but terrifyingly deep and equally easy to get lost in.  It’s not designed to be taken on the road.

But they have road gear!

Yes, Line6 offers not only studio gear.. but road gear as well.  Probably most notably is their POD line of equipment.

A buddy of mine happens to have a PODxt Live and is getting ready for a gig this weekend.  So he brought over his pod and we loaded it up to my studio and worked on getting some new patches into some of the unused user banks that he had free.

So we plug it up and start tweaking some tones and patches in GearBox and saving them down to the POD.  We test the tones against his telecaster, my strat and my duel humbucker warlock.  We feed the output of the POD to the little Fender Bandit amp and test it through the mixing board to the PA.. each individual tone themselves sound golden.

Then frustration sets in

Hours of fun in setting up individual tone patches led to hours of frustration in getting those tone patches to work together. 

The PODxt, in all of it’s smarts and brains and technology, does not have a “master level” control for all of it’s patches to the output.  Basically speaking, there’s no way to easily equalize the output of the various patches so that switching from one tone to the other doesn’t require you to touch the board with your hands.

For example, we built a clean tone with a hint of chorus and delay adjusting the levels of the amp, mic, effects and cabinets to get just the tone that we wanted.  Then we built a gritty tone that had some drive and classic distortion with some reverb.  To get the tone that we wanted from that patch we made the patch a bit “hotter”…

So when we play the clean tone at amp level everything sounds awesome!  Then tap the bank switch to flip to the gritty tone, and the ears start to bleed.  We have to reach down and turn down the channel volume on the POD to make the amp level the same as what we had with the clean tone.

It seems to me, that since these tones are being produced through digital signal processing, that there should be some sort of overall output signal adjustment to level all of the patches to be the same.  If you want more volume from a patch.. well hell, that’s what the volume peddle is for right?

This seems to be a common complaint

In our efforts to resolve this problem, we did some research and digging around.  The common consensus is to “take the quietest patch and beef it up, then adjust the levels on your louder patches to bring them down”.  But in doing that, you’re changing the tone!

Some people are even going so far as to buy SPL meters and adjusting patch levels by what’s coming out of the amp!  That’s great… as long as you never move your amp or change venue’s or plug into a different amp or PA <eyeroll>.

Closing Thoughts…

In all fairness, I’ve not yet auditioned the POD x3 or the POD x3 Live so this problem may have been addressed with those products.  However, the x3 version uses the same GearBox and Monkey software that the GuitarPort and PODxt uses, so I’m doubtful that is truly the case.

I say unto you Line6, you guys make awesome studio gear and give us great tones.. But please don’t forget that there are gigging musicians out there who are having troubles with your gear and want to bring those same high quality patches with them out of the studio onto the road!

If anyone of you out there knows how to properly set the patch levels across multiple tones, please don’t hesitate to let us know.  ‘Cause obviously, we’re to stupid to figure it out :(