I love my J. I also have a little Fender Frontman 25R, and a Vox amp, which are nice too, but for recording the J is sweet.
Now, of course there will be a load of people saying modellers suck, and they are entitled to that opinion. I love mine. I have never used a POD or V-amp for comparison, but I get nice sound out of my J. Either direct on teh S/PDIF port, or turning cabinet emulation off and running it into one of my other amps as an FX unit. It has a really nice onboard compressor, nice effects, and some of the amp models sound really nice. They don't sound identical to what htey are modelling, but they sound really good . That is all I could want is a modeller that gives me a wide variety of tones and sounds.
If you get one, you must use the J-edit feature (hook it up via MIDI to your PC), and you can get really fine control of the parameters. Otherwise the editing of it from the buttons alone is very challenging and limiting. You also need a good MIDI foot controller for it so taht you can switch patches, turn on and off effects, tap tempo for delay, turn on comps or reverb etc. The Johnson floorboards are pricey, and in this (and only this ) I will swear by Behringer:
the FCB1010. You can set that thing up to do anything you want, it is
solid metal, very rugged, has two expression pedals, 10 switches and I also use it as an extension to my MIDI controller for organ/piano pedals, changing patches in my soft synths, triggering playback in SONAR, etc. It makes no sound (it is a midi controller) so that overcomes the Behringer name ....
I play
an Epiphone Wildkat guitar, semi hollow body, 3/4 size archtop that is the same size and shape as a Les Paul, with P90 pickups and that guitar and the J-station
Fender Bandmaster, Vox AC30, Marshall stacks and Fender Blackface sound really good.
A couple of tricks for gettng the best sound for recording. Use a y-cable into your guitar, run one line to a mixer, and send the aux out to an amp (any amp), send the other half of the Y-cable to the J-station. So, when you play, your guitar reacts to teh amplifier, which in turn fattens the tone of the signal going to the J (you can also get great feedback this way and record it). I also record
simultaneously from the S/PDIF port and run the analog outs into my mixer---> soundcard and record the digital signal and the analog signal and mix them together to make a fatter sound. PLUS the dry guitar signal that I have sent to my mixer, I record that too, so I have an untreated guitar track recorded, so that I can reroute that back to any amp I want or back to the J to try different patches.
Guitar ----> Y cable ----> one end to the J-station
|___> one end to a mixer
J-station ---> S/PDIF to soundcard
|----> analog outs to mixer
Mixer----> 1 aux bus (L) of the clean guitar sound to amplifier just to get some sound in teh air for the guitar, other aux bus (R) to the soundcard to record a clean signal, MAIN sends to soundcard to record the J-station modified signal.
Basically I am recording three tracks from teh guitar: S/PDIF, treated analog, and clean analog, plus one clean send to an amp to make my guitar body react
Late at night I do not use the path to the amplifier....
J-station
, but funds are short. My behringer amp/effects unit, does not seem to have that crunching sound I so desire, so I am also wondering if this is a step up or not. Another reason for me to get it is because the cheesy bass amp I'm using is flaky and shitty sounding, and I don't anything else to run the bass thru.
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