Did I Give Eleven Rack Enough of A Chance?

[Vercingetorix]

Originally Posted by Chris Townsend

Awesome to hear you guys are digging the Custom Clean model, although I'm not sure if you are referring to the Modern Clean or the Vintage Clean.

Anyhow, I think there's one other new thing in the Expansion Pack that will appeal to people looking for moderately clean/slightly dirty tones, which is the addition of speaker breakup. The new speaker breakup can smooth out some of the harshness when the power tubes are slightly clipping.

More info on speaker breakup can be found here:
http://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=297417

Oops, I meant the DC Modern Clean - yes, very happy with it. I didn't even know there was a Vintage Clean - I haven't used it - yet .

[Tom Hartman]

Originally Posted by Larue

So after trying everything I came back. (And yes I tried the Axe-Fx.)

Hey thanks to all, great comments, it's funny to see several of you who got rid of Eleven, then got it again, which is about where I'm at.

I see you tried Axe FX...what did you think? I've never played through one but it sounds amazing in clips. The one thing Avid didn't do, probably to meet price points, is give Eleven enough horsepower to use Dual amps, which is a shame. Some of the stereo setups in the Axe are scary good. And of course the FX are better, and should be for 1500.00 for the standard model.

I get hired to do a TON of karaoke work, weekly. About five songs a week. The schedule is draining and non stop. I have to cover many styles, very quickly. So again, using a real mic and amp is just not practical. I do that on projects where I have some time. I need a box, with patches saved, ready to go. So Eleven seems to make a lot of sense. I worry about it's reliability after one website took one apart and showed how feeble the power supply is, but I suppose that's the least of my problems right now.

The clean demo's sound great (Classical Gas, etc)...I was not able to get anything that clean out of mine. The "Twin Reverb" patch was just plain silly, a TR is has NO grit, no nothing, it's CLEAN CITY all the way, and the patch with my guitars just sounded spitty. I did try watching my levels, but it had no depth and again, had little bits of crackles in it that were nothing like a real Twin. So the new clean amps sound interesting.

In country stuff, there is a lot of that "half clean, half dirty" stuff going on, which I do remember Eleven doing rather well on one of the presets. So again, I may have needed to spend more time, and the new presets sound good.

I'll give a report back when I figure this all out this week. Another person mentioned to me that a great DI going into Eleven Rack makes a huge difference, something else I could check out.

thanks again
Tom

[adamqlw]

Have to disagree with the DI bit. I think a big part of the 11R magic is in the True-Z. A DI box negates this impact. Perhaps you should record some clips, I'm curious to hear what it is you're hearing. It sounds like it might have been a defective unit to me, after all, it's certainly capable of squeaky clean tones.

[TLTD]

I liked using an overdrive pedal into the Eleven Rack as well as keeping a DI but using an Ultra G so it goes through XLR with a little bit of preamp gain. I never liked the guitar in sounds myself but the Gray Compressor seemed to smooth it out. I'm going to get the Expansion and see if playing with speaker breakup and pEQs helps. I primarily just use old tube preamps through the rear inputs and either kill the amps or dial them to add a little bit of bite but I need to turn the speaker breakup off I think to get what I am trying for (or up I dunno). I've liked using IRs with Mellow Muse IR1A or the Sansamp Plugin for cabs but I'm hoping the Expansion Pack gets me to where I don't need software to get what I want. I wish they could have a Rack version of Recabinet 3 as that's phenomenal sounding with both tube preamps and the Eleven Rack amps but I have to use it in post because I don't have Pro Tools 9 so it only works with Cakewalk.

[Larue]

Originally Posted by Tom Hartman

I see you tried Axe FX...what did you think?
Tom

I have a lot of respect for the Axe-Fx, and might pick one up again at a later time, but I'm trying to keep it simple. The amps in the Axe have a smoothness to them that I haven't really found in anything else.

But with some work, you can get good tones out of a lot of these amp sim products, and for me, I just liked the easy integration that the 11R has with Pro Tools. I've managed to pull decent tones out of Amp Farm, Pod Farm, and Amplitube in the past. I will say this, though -- sometimes the amp you think is going to work, doesn't. It's often some other amp you never thought of trying that works best for the part.