How can this be?
For example, combo amp captures. A few seem fine. I plug my Tele in, and with a little tweaking, it sounds great.
But for the vast majority, the capture is impossibly dull sounding regardless of how I twiddle the knobs.
I’m leaving the QC input set to zero. I’ve tried all impedance settings.
Ideas?
are you talking about Factory captures, or users’ on the CLoud for DL?
Everyone’s signal chain is different and personalized. You have to find what works for yours. Obviously thousands of users are finding success with captures, but it can take some time to find the right ones. Captures in general aren’t not meant for ‘knob-twiddling,’ they are a static snapshot of one particular setting of an amp and the setting controls of the capture will not adjust it like they would on the actual amp. If the capture doesn’t work for you, it’s best to move on to another one.
Perhaps some specifics would be more productive:
what tone are you looking for? What kind of amps do you favor? What other blocks are you using in your preset?
If you’re talking about combo amps captures on the QC, none of the Factory captures have speakers included. For some, this would work ok without a cab- the clean ones will sound clean and bright. Once you pick one with some OD though, they will be brittle and harsh and require a cabinet or IR.
Hey man, there’s a lot that goes into this equation!
What kind of pickups are you using? Is it factory pick up height?
A good set up will go a long way. I’ve been buying presets from others since I was 17 and it wasn’t till I got my guitar professionally set up that I really started enjoying capturing units.
All that said, if you need a capture that you know hasn’t been fiddled with, you’re welcome to follow me on Cortex Cloud and I’ll share you something to test with. Let me know!
Factory captures. Clean. Mid-gain. High-gain.
If I plug my guitar into any hardware amp, I expect to be able to dial something in. Not so for captures. Vast majority are muffled beyond hope. A few sound great.
I have stripped it down to just the capture. Or just the capture and an amp block if necessary.
Mexican Telly. Setup is good. Pickups are typical single coil. Sounds great on a real amp. Sounds great on a few of the captures.
Is this not the same experience that everyone else is having? What percentage of factory captures would you say you can work with in any reasonable fashion? Not that you’re happy with. Anything that feels like it’s in the ballpark.
The point is, not useable for you. There are so many different takes on what a great tone is.
A live patch will often be a lot more mid-focussed to translate well. It may sound lifeless at low volume, but the Fletcher-Munson rule means that the bass and treble will be emphasised when played at gig levels.
I saw this a lot with Michael Britt profiles on the Kemper.
Interesting topic @dlabrecqoe
Usually the factory captures are good on my setup, or at least it’s audible where they are going with the sound. Both on bass and that other six stringed feeble finger stringed one.
You can look at it this way: The factory presets are usually great sounding, depending on what you’re looking for, but it’s another matter with presets on the cloud. Those heavily depend on your own setup and the preset setup. Some sound great straight away, but sometimes the capture in them sound awful alone or in other presets. The way I do it is by EQ block and/or cap EQ’ing/tweaking. Or just forget about them for other than the original preset.
It’s sometimes hard to impossible to figure out what people were hearing and what setup they used setting things up on the grid, without a description.
Silly question, but are you using a cab block? If there is no cab block things all sound muffled.
For factory captures especially, I find 100% of them ‘usable.’ Not on their own, obviously; but none are of a poor quality. The new V2 captures are fairly extreme, but they are meant to be in order to demonstrate the capabilities gain- and compression-wise.
How are you monitoring your signal? Headphones? Speakers? What is your listening setup/environment?
You say you’ve stripped down to just capture, and amp block if necessary. Did you mean cab block?
This is my challenge. I have not found a way to communicate my experience. Let me try this:
Imagine trying a capture that has no top end at all. It’s completely muffled. It’s like nothing you’ve ever heard on any record ever. Anyone on the planet who heard it would call it unusable.
That’s what I’m talking about. Not taste. Not preference. Dark and not usable anywhere, ever, by anyone.
UPDATE: forgot to say also having tweaked all the EQ as much as possible.
When needed, yes. But if I goofed, and didn’t, I would have the opposite problem, no? (i.e., bright and fizzy rather then dull and muffled)
100% usable? That has me thinking something’s wrong over here. If that were the case, though, how is it that a few sound absolutely great? 
Friedman ASC10 is my monitor. Yes, I meant cab block. Sorry.
Could my experience be explained by not selecting the right cab block as I dial through different amps? I hadn’t thought it could make such a significant difference.
it’s widely accepted that IR’s/cabinet blocks have one of the largest effects on tone, percentage-wise. It could absolutely be the culprit here. Many feel the NDSP cabinets are bassy and some might call that ‘muffled.’
I really feel like your case has to relate to either an external issue with power amp/speaker or cabling, etc- it’s too ‘universal’ in your case, everything should not sound ‘that’ bad unless something is wrong somewhere in the chain.
If you could specify which sound ‘great’ to you, it might help us narrow down the issues
Or, if you want, make and upload a preset which sounds bad in your setup, maybe even record how it sounds, and we can try it on our setups and find the problem. It could be the capture / cab combination as was pointed out before.
Thanks, everyone. Headed out of town for a week, but when I come back, I would like to try some of the suggested diagnostic approaches. Really appreciate everyone’s input.
Sorry I never answered this directly. As you can see, below, this is not a subtle phenomenon. To answer your question about what kinds of tones I’m after: A real variety. Everything I’m clean to real-high gain.
I’ve started from scratch building a patch to eliminate other factors. I like all kinds of amps. Oh, and I’m talking about factory captures.