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Old 08-30-2013, 05:33 PM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2010
Location: USA
Posts: 19,510
Default Re: cant get any distortion to sound good

What amp/cab are you used to playing with? Do you have that amp/cab where you can compare to the ER/headphone sound?

It is hard to work out what "fake" means acoustically.

A not uncommon problems with users and the Eleven rack seem to be folks running amp gain settings much higher than they would/have done with a real amp and not hearing what they are used to. The other is just volume. If you are used to/looking for the punch of a live large amp you won't get that through headphones, and not at what many of us would usually listen to at quieter headphone volumes. It takes some pretty decent full range stage monitors to get close to an "amp in the room" feel.

And again I don't use the Eleven Rack with active pickups but if I do put a boost/distortion/fuzz pedal in front of it I do expect to have to significantly tweak around the settings to sound good (often running at lower level than I would run into a real valve amp) because you are not really driving a valve preamp. (and unfortunately the Eleven Rack has no analog front-end gain control). Do you have a volume pedal you can stick between the guitar and ER and play with different settings just to see if that helps.

If you can borrow or buy a nice headphone amp you might want to try that with the Eleven Rack. Even if your headphones are not too hard to drive. Try different volumes.

Another mistake folks make is (intentionally or unintentionally) turning off cabinet sim/resonance/breakup. You want all that stuff on. An amp without a cab sim sounds just awful. And dialing up speaker breakup can really help some things sound better. You have to be prepared to play around a bit.

The parametric EQ in the ER is also helpful in dialing in tone. But I cannot suggest things based on the current description,

To get help the most useful here I think you are going to need to pick a rig that is close to what you are used to playing with and try to describe the differences as best you can. If you can A/B the ER and a real amp or recording of that amp then that may help. If you can record that amp and compare recordings even better. You can also post recordings on Soundcloud or similar and describe what you think us wrong with the recording. If nothing else that analytical approach might help you a lot Disling in that you want.
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