Anybody have any experience with the Line 6 POD HD500X Guitar Floor Multi-Effects Pedal?
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Anybody have any experience with the Line 6 POD HD500X Guitar Floor Multi-Effects Pedal?
They're capable of Grammy winning performances in the right hands. Fine piece of kit, and a super intro-to-modeling platform. As noted above, forget the presets, they're ridiculous. Just dial in a nice Fender clean and then add your effects, then a Marshall, then an AC30 and then there ain't much you can't do with those three.
But the question is, what are you going to play it through? You'll need a power amp and speakers for live performance. If you're only going to use it with headphones or for recording you're all set, bit if you want to go live it starts getting REALLY expensive quickly. You'll blow past boutique tube amp prices in about a minute - however - with high-end audio components in your rack you'll sound a lot, lot, lot better onstage.
So in short, for practicing and recording they're a great value, for live performance be prepared to have a couple grand wrapped up before you finish.
One shortcut I used earlier on was to find used Line6 Power engines and use them for power amp and speaker duties. With a HD500X and a couple of Power Engines you can have a really nice sounding rig for under a grand.
Thanks, guys. I’ll be using it mostly for recording. And I’ll be putting it through my little PA when my jamming buddy comes over. He’s in love with my DRRI, so I like to let him use it the relatively few times we get together. I usually switch over to bass when he’s around. Yeah I remember that the presets on the Podxt were mostly crap as well.
Willie, for large venues I'll of course be putting everything out through he mains, but you need to have a stage monitor too. A few reasons why:Quote:
Originally Posted by ch willie
1) If you only use the sound system you'll blow up the vocals in the monitors. Quickly.
2) For small to medium venues you most likely won't have a stereo mix. That means there's no pan on your guitar and you lose the separation of instruments necessary for a good mix. Imagine if everything was only coming out of the mains in stereo, and then you switched it to mono. Yech!
3) Adding to (2), if the guitar is mono in the mains and the monitors, it's just everywhere and becomes impossible to mix correctly.
What most of us do is add a power amp to our racks and use that for a stage monitor speaker placed behind us, basically doing the same thing as a speaker cabinet for an amp. Mine are three-ways so you get incredibly crisp definition on the guitar, way past anything a traditional tube amp can deliver. That helps tremendously when using the higher-gain models you need for modern music. Your guitar will cut through even with all the distortion and you don't need to depend on volume alone to be heard. Especially on dropped D stuff like Bad Girlfriend and others of that ilk. The signal is also sent on the balanced outputs to the mains and mixed in as required. You do need to have some of your signal sent regardless.
For the small clubs, we only send the bottom end of the guitar into the mains. Bass is pretty much non-directional anyway, and you need to have the power of the sound system's power amps and big speakers to drive that big bottom and make your guitar sound huge and juicy. That's also where you add your reverb as well. I never use reverb on stage as it muddies the mix. Delay? Yes. Reverb? No. If you reverb the bottom end through the mains thats where you get that big stage sound in even a club that only holds 200 people. The girls will all be dancing and the dorky guys standing alone in the back wearing Fender Tee shirts will compliment you on your "tone" after the show. DO NOT tell them it was all your Axefx! Trust me. I've been called names.
For some big shows if they're running mist I may also throw in a pair of Altec Lansing Lightnings which are driven Bluetooth and run them as satellites. They add some bling to the stage because they have the LED rings and add to the show. They serve as guitar monitors for the rest of the guys. Mist seems to soak up the sound on stage a little so the satellites help. I've seen some other guys throw small JBL mains on stands on either side of the sage pointing sideways at the band when using mist too.
I know that's a bunch to process but there's a point to it. Once you let go of the paradigm that "Thou shalt not play without a tube amp behind you" you start to have almost endless possibilities on how to make your sound extremely high-fidelity with almost endless versatility, and you can place that sound wherever you need it.
The only caveat to all this is - once you start playing in this mode, any mistakes you make will jump out of the mix as clearly as everything else. So know your s#it.
OA, thanks, man. As always, you're a good source of knowledge. I won't be playing guitar live in the foreseeable future. I'm just going to use it for recording. Eventually, I want to take the song-cycle I'm recording onto the stage, but when I do, I'll play bass.
I actually went ahead last night and ordered the thing. It should be here a few days after Christmas. I'll give a report as soon as it comes in and I learn how to use it.