Getting THE tone

Tone... Oh tone... I'd say the hardest to obtain in the world, is good tone. Ya you might get a decent tone through your headphones with your Line 6 POD (that's me!) but the next second you plug your POD into an amp, everything's lost, and you have to start tweaking again.

So I have this PODxt Live which rocks still (steel... anyway does anyone have a zoom g9.2tt to trade?), I can get a nice tone through my headphones. Brought it to the music room, plugged it into the Line 6 Flextone III (wtf POD into Flextone ki siao), everything changed! But luckily I could still fine tune everything by tweaking the Flextone's eq on board without having to tweak EVERY SINGLE PATCH in my POD. And that's going straight into the guitar input of the amp. So what about by-passing the pre-amp and go straight to the power amp? I tried this. It sounded ok at least but was a tad muddy for my taste and I didn't have a 'global eq' to fine tune everything since the pre-amp on the Flextone was by-passed anyway. I thought it might be the speakers on the Flextone that were changing everything. Then I plugged my POD into a KEYBOARD amp which was supposed to be neutral sounding and, this is madness, pure harshness. Playing songs on my laptop through the keyboard amp sounded awesome but my tone! Everything was lost. Everything had super high mids and treble! I turned down the mid and treble in my patches to 0, turned down the keyboard amp's mid and treble to 0 as well, everything was still super harsh sounding. Bad. There ain't no tone. That made me sad. I think I will just do the normal way next time by just going straight into the guitar input of the Flextone.

Anyway, 1 thing to note is, your tone might be awesome in bedroom level, take it out for a jamming session or gig and it might be the worst tone ever. When you play loud, your ears really feel the mids and highs in your tone which in some cases isn't that pleasant but you can't just turn everything down! You will sound like mud and be lost in the mix! How to make good tone loud? I don't know yet. I'm still learning. I need my tone! I want it warm but I still want it to cut through. It's a tough learning process but, it's worth it when you finally get your tone. Life without good tone is not worth living. Get the right tone, and the world will be a beautiful place.