Little help with playing direct

Joined: 30 Nov 2003 Posts: 52 Location: Delawhere

If you had to play directly into a PA, which modeler/multi-effects unit would you use?

Cost won't be the deciding factor, but value (bang/buck) is important to me.

Line 6 POD2.0 or XT? Line 6 AM-4 of DL-4?

Behringer V-AMP 2 (or new V-AMP Floor?

BOSS ME-50? GT-6?

DigiTech GNX (1,2,3)? RP (50, 100)?

Not asking for much, am I?

'Preciate any comments.

Joined: 30 Nov 2003 Posts: 1088 Location: Espoo, Finland

Well, I haven't tried any of those modelers except V-amp 2 which I recently bought. So far I've been enjoying for home use a lot. I can get a desent higain and clean sound out of it. Also the effects are quite nice.

Mikko

Guest

A POD v2 with the floorboard would be IT fer me! Has a lovely wah function, IMHO! More flexibility I believe. Not as familiar with the others. You can get a Johnson J/Station for like $80 right now, if you can find one still in stock. They must have sumthin BIG coming out after NAMM! They're dumping all their amps and stuff for cheap.

Joined: 02 Dec 2003 Posts: 136 Location: Tulsa, OK

I've used most of the items you have listed. They're all pretty good for direct sounds. They all have pretty similar sounds to them, so its hard to recomend one over the other. The v-amp 2 is by far the cheapest solution, and sound great, but the construction isn't as solid as a podxt. I'd shy away from the digitech and boss products (even though I use a boss gt-5 direct as my main backup). It just doesn't seem like a good idea to have your whole sound coming out of something that you stomp on night after night, right where people are going to spill things. With a v-amp or pod, your going to need a pedal board, but they're less likely to flake out (less electronics in them) and cheaper to replace than a gt-6 or a digitech unit.

On a side note, going direct out of a modeler live can be a pain if you don't have your own monitor mix. I've had to do it on occasion(never had to use my gt-5 because "my" amp flaked out, but the other guitarist in a previous band had a flextone that was notorious for refusing to function the day of gigs) and it was a nightmare trying to pick my guitar out of the main monitor mix. To that end I recomend picking up a cheap solid state amp or a powered pa speaker to run through, just so you can hear yourself on stage. That basically gives you the same setup I have with my trademark 120 (I run the xlr direct outs straight to the board, and just keep the stage volume high enough for me to hear it)