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Tone Zone articles.
Line 6 POD XT
Variax 700
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By Andy Z - April 2004
When was the last time you strapped on your guitar and were ready to throw down some licks and realized something wasn't adding up? Did you have your Strat on and wanted to play some Van Halen licks, or did you have your Les Paul ready to go and were gonna belt out some Stevie Ray Vaughan? Well maybe this can help guide you to dial in the tones you want a bit quicker without having to start ripping your patches apart to find the tone you want.
For the purposes of this example, I'll be using a PODxt and displaying the settings using the GuitarPort software. This should get you close enough, whether your using a Variax, a real Les Paul or Strat, or a Flextone, Spider or other Line 6 product.
Every amp model responds differently. Some will require almost no change, such as high gain models like the Spinal Puppet. Where you might only be changing the bass and treble so slightly to accomodate the characteristics between single-coil and humbucker pickups. But when you start getting more into cleaner tonalities, you need to use some other tools provided in the Line 6 product to help shape it.
In this example, we're going to use the lead tone for the Stevie Ray Vaughan tune "Tightrope", which most of us know was played on the neck pickup of a Fender Stratocaster. You'll see in the following graphics how most of the main amp model controls changes. It is using the 1958 Tweed B-Man model with the 4x10 Line 6 cab simulation. The recommended guitar is a single-coil model, so in order to make this sound as useable as can be with a humbucker guitar, the following things need to change.
Due to the thick definition of the humbucker pickup, we need to decrease the Drive and Mid controls and increase the Treble and Presence controls. This should be a fairly standard exercise in almost any application between using a single-coil and humbucker guitar. The inverse should hold true going from a humbucker to single-coil guitar. We would need to increase the Drive and Mid controls and decrease the Treble and Presence controls. In this case, no change was needed for this amp model for the bass control for either type of pickup.
Single-Coil - Neck Pickup Settings...
Humbucker - Neck Pickup Settings...
Now we can get into a few things that can really help shape the tone even more. One trick I use, is by actvitating the Classic Distortion Stomp. In many cases you can use it to filter the tone without really adding more gain or distortion. You'd basically test this out by turning the Classic Distortion Stomp on and off matching the Drive and Gain level to the already set Drive on the main control. Then by adjusting the Tone value of the Classic Distortion Stomp.
For this example we'll be taking advantage of the distortion itself and to shape the tone more. You can see that we decreased the drive for the humbucker guitar, but we also increased the gain accordingly to keep the right amount of edge for this tone. The most noticeable change was the tone knob. We increased the tone filter from 55% to 70%. This really helps get us back to the right amount of brightness you'd expect from a single-coil pickup.
We didn't need to this time, but another trick you can do is change the Mic model used in the A.I.R. setting. Sometimes changing to on or off axis, or by switching from say the Shure SM 57 to the Sennheiser 421 mic model, you can tighten up to open up the sound desired. It's not an exact science, but knowing how to use some of these subtleties can help you be even more inspired in your playing.
I have included the GuitarPort tones here, which should be fine importing into the Line 6 Edit software as well. I've also included MP3's below to hear the differences explained above. The audio samples were played on a Line 6 Variax 500 guitar, using the Spank (Strat) neck position for the single-coil MP3, and the Lester (Les Paul) neck position for the humbucker MP3. I tuned down to E-flat as the song dictates, to try and give the same tonality as we would expect to hear.
Go to the Line 6 CustomTone page.
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