Just picked up my quad cortex earlier this week and I’m super excited to incorporate it as my pedalboard in my upcoming gigs. Most of my gigs are ampless (I play in Nashville on Broadway) so going direct from the QC to the board should be no problem. At rehearsal yesterday for my original project, Soulchess (shameless plug if you like funk electronic and rock music), I tried running my QC as a pedalboard and sent output 3 into the input of my amp.
I play a Lakland Skyline DJ5 which is a pretty punchy bass if not anything else and I just found that going through the couple of presets I created that sounded great at home sounded thin at rehearsal, almost like there was a phase issue, which there shouldn’t be since I’m just running a single mono output.
Has anyone else run into this issue, whether on guitar or bass? I’m no gear nerd so I could be off, but I thought turning off the amp sim on the QC would fix it, but it ended up making the tone super muddy. I really liked the quality of the tone and the frequency range it covered, just lost a lot of the fundamental. Let me know if you have any answers to this. Thanks!
That’s a common problem. When you create a preset at home you most likely have a different setup (amp, speakers/headphones, room, loudness, no bandmates, etc.) and so it will sound different.
If I need a preset for rehearsal, I build it there. Or start one at home and fine tune it during the rehearsal. Same applies vice versa.
how are you building tones at home? Via headphones? They can give a false impression if you’re working in stereo but sum the outputs to mono for other applications. That could certainly cause audible phasing issues.
Are you sure your signal path is mono before it hits your single Output Block?
Can you show a pic of your preset grid here?
You’re probably just going to need to create separate presets for home use and for use with your band; no biggie - probably just some EQ, gain, and possibly compression compensation for the different situations. it’s easy for me since my band plays through headphones at rehearsals, so my home presets sound just as good with the band (and then the soundman deals with any EQ stuff at gigs), but if you’re changing up your whole scenario, yeah, you’ll need different settings. Don’t worry; that just means you get to play more and tweak the QC more
Well for the exact reason you first stated, I did start on headphones, then moved to practice amp, then today I pulled my typical gig rig and really demoed it out. I also saw on another post that I will link here that going out of send 1 or 2 instead of Outputs 1 or 2 will bypass the QC preamp.
It for sure drastically altered the tone so I feel like that’s working and now I’ve built an entire preset from scratch (overwriting the old one before seeing your response so sorry I can’t provide that) and I do feel like I’m getting somewhere now. There is definitely still a coloration that is happening even on a blank slate preset that I’m not sure I’m in love with, but I just got the thing so I’m pretty sure with enough tweaking with EQ, compression etc I can get what I’m looking for.
Not to dismiss my own post, I guess I’m still wondering if people find their bass tone kinda hollow sounding out of the box and need to do a lot of compensating or if there’s something I’m missing. Also checked another post and tried altering the impedence but I couldn’t really hear a major difference in respect to what I was concerned with about the tone. Any additional suggestions would be great though!
Likely true! Not mad about tweaking things out more, I was just hoping my experience wasn’t a common and difficult one. Mostly got the heeby jeebies because I have a casino gig Saturday that I was planning on demoing this on but I may wait another week before taking it out just to fine tune it.
no routing will bypass the QC preamps- perhaps they meant the preamp of the physical amp they were connecting audio outputs to.
I think you’ll get familiar with the process once you’ve spent some time with it. It’s definitely best to create tones at the volume and speaker-style you’ll be performing with if possible, but it gets easier each time you see how what you’ve done so far translates
The above exactly reflects my own experience - anticipation. It is why I avoid absolutist statements about the “only” way or equipment to use to program presets. I do prefer using an FRFR for my initial preset design though, final tweaks at rehearsal at closer to gig volumes.
Different brands of monitoring equipment - headphones, FRFRs, amps, cabs, etc. also affect how well a preset may translate to stage. Not to speak of what kind of PA you end up playing through and how your soundperson runs the board. Another factor can be how complex your presets are. There are often fewer nuances to translate to stage with simpler presets. Never let that stop me from building an involved preset though.
