I have various of effect equipment to electric guitar: Line 6 PODHD500, Digitech GSP1101; RP355; RP350, Various stompboxes, Axon AX 100 MKll guitar synth, BOSS GT-10. And my question or wondering are, what are best to connect this devices to on stage for example? My Marshall Class 5 guitar tube amp or my two Behringer fullrange PA Speakers B208D? I read on line 6 commersial that PODHD500 are not meant to be connected to an guitar tube amp that was developed in the 1940-50s so i think the "modern" Behringer PA Speaker are better to that device and i also get stereo sound (two speakers), what do you think? And what about the stompboxes, should i connect them to PA speakers or a (tube) amp?
PA Speakers or Guitar amp
- Thread starter Harald12
- Start date
As ever with sound reproduction, it depend upon your ultimate aim and what each piece of equipment is designed to do.
Might sound patronizing, but a guitar amp is designed to produce the appropriated sound from an electric guitar. Clean, crunchy, mild or very distorted and ten to the 3 hours and ten to the 6 $$$$ are spent on the variations! This reproduced signal is band limited, generally from about 100Hz to 8kHz (10 kHz tops).
A PA system is designed to reproduce any and all frequencies of the performance, from the vocals, guitar amp, keys and often drums.
A guitar FX unit (not a simple pedal) is usually intended to take a guitar signal and process it so that it "looks like" a guitar amped signal, i.e. band limited and possibly distorted, reverb'ed, delayed, what have you. This signal therefore should go through a "flat" PA since you don't want to "process" it twice.
"Stomp boxes" are intended to go (usually) between guitar and guitar amp and modify the signal in ways the amp is not capable of doing. Could be as simple as just adding 20dB more gain. Some FX boxes work better in an amp's FX loop.
Some pedal (cough!) of course have an extra, emulated output intended for feeding a PA or recorder.
Phew! Helpful?
Dave.
ashcat_lt
Well-known member
Honestly, the only right answer is that you plug it into whichever amp lets you get closest to the sound that you want to hear and to fuck with all the rules!
That said, I tend to think of the Pod as just what you said - it's an amp, a speaker, and a mic. Now, if you were to just take an amp on stage, plug it into a speaker, and put a mic in front of the speaker, what would you plug that mic into? Would you plug it into another guitar amp, or the PA? And where would you plug in the pedals?
The synth is kind of a different question. They almost always either run to a full range amp (a good keyboard amp is essentially a PA) or direct to the FOH PA, because again the sound is assumed to have been shaped to exactly what we want already, and we just want to make it louder. There's no reason you can't run it through a guitar amp (real or modelled) if you want to shape the sound further, or in ways that you can't recreate on the synth itself.
Now, having said all that, some amp modellers put out a kind of "digital hash" or noise or distortion that sits and spits and fizzes up in the frequency range that a real guitar speaker won't pass. They seem to be getting better all the time, but it seems to be the biggest real complaint I've heard about the things. A simple low pass filter somewhere around 8K usually helps this immensely. Even just turning down the "Treble" knob on the PA channel helps quite a bit. Those high frequencies aren't really what give the cabinet model its signature, anyway. We're interested mostly in the midrange resonances that all guitar cabs have. And that's why we usually want to run a modeller into a flat amp/speaker cabinet. Run it through a guitar amp and you'll have its midrange resonance superimposing over whatever the modeler is trying to do. That might sound cool, but it won't sound like the cabinet that you called up on the unit.
That said, I tend to think of the Pod as just what you said - it's an amp, a speaker, and a mic. Now, if you were to just take an amp on stage, plug it into a speaker, and put a mic in front of the speaker, what would you plug that mic into? Would you plug it into another guitar amp, or the PA? And where would you plug in the pedals?
The synth is kind of a different question. They almost always either run to a full range amp (a good keyboard amp is essentially a PA) or direct to the FOH PA, because again the sound is assumed to have been shaped to exactly what we want already, and we just want to make it louder. There's no reason you can't run it through a guitar amp (real or modelled) if you want to shape the sound further, or in ways that you can't recreate on the synth itself.
Now, having said all that, some amp modellers put out a kind of "digital hash" or noise or distortion that sits and spits and fizzes up in the frequency range that a real guitar speaker won't pass. They seem to be getting better all the time, but it seems to be the biggest real complaint I've heard about the things. A simple low pass filter somewhere around 8K usually helps this immensely. Even just turning down the "Treble" knob on the PA channel helps quite a bit. Those high frequencies aren't really what give the cabinet model its signature, anyway. We're interested mostly in the midrange resonances that all guitar cabs have. And that's why we usually want to run a modeller into a flat amp/speaker cabinet. Run it through a guitar amp and you'll have its midrange resonance superimposing over whatever the modeler is trying to do. That might sound cool, but it won't sound like the cabinet that you called up on the unit.
