Review Summary
I like the process of experimenting with new gear. If was gigging heavy I would just use a pair of Peavey Nashville 400 amps, Webb 6-14-E or a Nashville Steel King. Pair them with a
Hall of Fame or Eventide H9 reverb and I have tone so good I don't need to search elsewhere. But I enjoy trying out all the new stuff!
For standard guitar I like the old Fender Tube amps with flabby broken in speaker! I have found one amp I like better however and that is the Allen Encore amp linked above.
I replaced the TT15 speaker with a Cannabis Rex and it has the perfect balance of warmth, bass, harmonics and clarity all at once. The amp's reverb is as lush as a good hall reverb
and the mid control takes that circuit point down to zero resistance and increases the preamp gain to produce a warm over distortion sound much like the original Univox fuzz box.
This amp is pretty useless for pedal steel though.
The ToneX pedal with the Fender FRFR amp did not really impress me using the built in ToneX presets. With this latest review I have migrated to the ToneX pedal with
Joe Rogers' amp and cab/IR offerings and the ToneX FRFR powered amp. The ToneX FRFR can itself store up to 8 cab IR's and they are instantly switch selectable.
The Line 6 FRFR is another popular choice buy I have no experience with that.
Note that the ToneX pedal does not have a dedicated IR loader that will allow you to quickly
sample you different IR's with a given amp preset. You have to go into the ToneX software and create a preset, select an IR for it, then to the ToneX editor library
to load that preset into the pedal. Quad Cortex has an IR loader that will quickly allow you to swap IR's to compare their sounds instantly with a loaded preset. Note that
the ToneX software can store huge numbers or IR's but the ToneX pedal cannnot! The Quad pedal can directly store a huge number of IR's. Another option would be to sample sounds
with your DAW using an IR loader. Update: I did manage to load 31 of Joe's IR's into the ToneX pedal and now can quickly select between them for a given preset. It's still not
as handy swapping IR's as the Cortex.
I have included a few pictures below to
show my computer and hardware setups. Joe's offerings include a ton of amps, IR's all at different sample rates, lengths, microphones, effects settings, mic placements
(cone, cone edge, diaphragm, distances etc).
Your particular guitar, FRFR amp choice, signal chain and venue may sound completely different than mine such that your preferred settings may be different than mine.
Everything affects everything! The sound samples I've included below cover a very small subset of Joe's IR offerings but do include at least one of every amp from the amp packs
that I purchased.
1) I selected 31 speaker/cab IR's and then narrowed these down to about 5 that I liked the best for this review. For the amp presets I did a similar process and
then found combinations of amp presets and speaker IR's that I liked and recorded them.
2) None of the Nashville 400, Steel King or Webb amp combinations I tried sounded much like those amps that I have, Especially in the bass register they lacked the character
of their namesake amps. In all cases they sounded better coming out of the ToneX pedal headphoone jack than they did coming out of the ToneX FRFR cab. I played extensively with
various preset/IR combinations, FRFR amp settings, Eventide reverb in line and out of line (using the excellent ToneX plate reverb) and of course varying the ToneX pedal's EQ settings
in various ways. I do think the ToneX FRFR cab is a bit better sounding for steel guitar than the Fender FRFR. Also the single coil pickups in the Excels had a more classic liveley
sound than the 705 pickups in the MSA.
2) My final effort involved loading Joe's IR's directly into the ToneX cab presets. These proved to be more useful and in fact almost as good as my real amps. Much of
low string muddiness was gone and this is the way to go for me at this point. The D-130 speaker/cab IR tone was much improved when loaded in the ToneX cab than when
using it in the ToneX pedal preset. Of course you need ot make sure that you turn the CAB setting OFF in the pedal preset!
3) Nothing beats the simpicity and tone of a good dedicated steel combo amp IMHO. It does however limit you to one basic tone character and it's can be hard to get
that favored tone in all venues. Live sound on a gig is a crap shoot! The ToneX setup does give you more variety and I did notice that of my 4 guitars, the Excel
ones produced the best tone so your mileage will vary based on your setup includng the signal chain.
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