| Rockbeare Guitars |

As any visitor to this site can readily see, I spend a lot of money on guitars and gear. I’m a gearhound who takes the trouble to investigate, follow up and often purchase new and interesting things. This usually involves following a link from a publication, website or forum to make an enquiry of a manufacturer.

In the past few months alone, I’ve had yet more spectacularly crap experiences from people who claim to be trying to earn a living from inventing, manufactuing and selling guitar-related kit :

1 I’m looking to source a high-end piece of well-known rack kit from a European manufacturer through trade channels for a cable company for which I act as a brand ambassador. After four months, flipping between Twitter (their perferred method of communication) and email (mine) and numerous reminders and follow-ups, I am still in the dark. Rubbish communication.

2 I came across a really neat new low unit price accessory, only to be told by the manufacturer that there were but four dealers worldwide. Two were in US, one in Finland (wtf?) and one in UK whose minumum order is £150, which equates to about 60 of the item in question! After some admittedly pretty browbeating emails from me, the manufacturer agreed to provide a smaller quantity to his local dealer to sell & mail to me. The product arrived and is terrific.

3 I contacted a manufacturer of interesting new tuning gears asking for pricing and retailers. I’ve had no response at all despite repeated follow-ups on my part. He could be dead for all I know.

4 I sought the advice of the world’s leading specialist lutherie and parts dealer as the only seller of a particular set of replacement tuners for one of my instruments. They declined  to advise me on compatibility, so I ended up borrowing an instrument with the replacements I was comtemplating, dropping one into my own instrument successfully and then ordering them. The lutherie supplier made the money for doing asbsolutely nothing beyond posting them to me. Grr.

All of this comes on top of years’ experience of most retailers never returning sales enquiry calls, and dealers of pre-owned gear never following up even after they have diligently written down my genuine wishes in their ‘wants books’ in store. This even includes people I’ve spent serious money with and who know I’m good for a lot more.

Some of these experiences could be explained by the fact that press releases or marketing often precede the securing of effective dictribution or retail of new products – though it’s hardly much of an excuse.

But the truth is that they all linked by one thing – the general crapness that pervades musical instrument manufacture, marketing, distribution and retail. If you read their own trade media, you’ll get a strong sense of woe yet it’s as if most of them actually believe that the very thing they do is somehow beneath them, probably because they’re ‘artists’ themselves. Please.

To be fair, there are a few exceptions, VDC for example. Exemplary service and turnaround, but companies like them are the exception, not the rule.

Ok folks, here’s a pic of and some observations on the latest prototype I’ve been testing out.  It’s been an absolute blast, though maybe better not ask the neighbours for their views on its ca.36 watts.

It has several different features from the two I tested some months ago.  At my request, the tremolo has gone and its two controls have been replaced by ‘more’ and ‘reverb ‘dwell’.  Dwell affects the drive into the reverb circuit, and I find I don’t use it that much, I just preset it at about 9 o’clock and use tone and level to control the ‘verb.

‘More’ controls the level of the second, foot switchable channel.  The combination of level, more and headroom give limitless permutations of clean, shimmer, grainy and singing lead.  There’s no perceptible transition at all, just the smoothest transition into overdrive I’ve ever played, so for my playing style it’s fantastic.

I really think designer Cliff brown is on to something here.  Once again, this is an amp I can’t put to down. It even takes ‘difficult’ guitars like the Rick 360/12 and Gretsch Duo Jet in its stride.

The dedicated foot control has switches for trem and ‘verb which are currently redundant on this test rig.  It’s there only to switch between channels, but it also contains a very nice overdrive which adds yet another flavour to both the amp’s channels.

This particular prototype also had some low-end boost dialled in for another customer, and I find that muddies the detail a bit, but I gather it will be easy to take the eq from the earlier Safire I liked so much and combine it with this two-channel/’more’ setup.

Both amp and speaker cabs are finished in stained plywood which look fine but are really just housings for prototypes.  The 1×12 cab houses an Eminence red-frame ‘The Governor’ speaker which sounds really good, but doubtless there will be hours of further fun deciding which driver to settle on!

Fantastic, pix and more details to follow!

I’m picking up a modern reissue Fender Deluxe reverb combo today which I’ve got pretty cheap from a good friend. It fills the gap between my Lazy J 20 and Egnater Rebel 30.

Earlier in the week I listened to one against original tweed Deluxes from ’57 & ’58, and blackfaces from ’63 & ’64. They have a bit more detail and character but this will be a great gigging/working amp, and good with pedals.

.., just gradually more and more disillusioned with the sounds of my Line 6 Pod X3 Pro preamp and Variax guitar.  They’re really flexible in combination and great for bedroom players and gated high-gain sounds, but no so great for the clean and lower-gain stuff I usually favour.

As the Variax has no magnetic pickups, it’s virtually noiseless, but when you go back to a real guitar through a real tube amp, you’re reminded how compressed and artificial the modelling sounds.

Not really instruments, more consumer electronics.   Ok for some, but I’m over them…

Intro

All of these devices treat guitar sounds, albeit in different ways.  All are switchable and very flexible. It’s perhaps unfair to compare them directly as they do different things, but there is also considerable overlap, so here we go…

Background & overview

The Axe-Fx and X3 Pro are ‘modellers’ and work (variously well) on any guitar, whereas the GR55 combines Roland’s modelling with synth sounds and requires a hex pickup input.  In the order I acquired them :

The Pod X3 Pro succeeded Line 6’s first rackmounted preamp/effects unit, the Pod Pro, and was quite a step up from it.  Its main attraction was that it offers two parallel signal paths, so you can use a favourite studio engineer’s trick, bi-amping.

(Put simply, not only is this a good way of adding space and texture to sounds, but it can go much further.  By running two amps in parallel, you for example get the percussive front-edge of a note from one and the sustained overdriven tail from the other, so you can combine classic amps to imitate the behaviours of the finest boutique amps).

The Axe-Fx and is successor, the Axe-FX II, define the state of the art in guitar amp modelling by using incredibly powerful processors accurately to model amplifier and effect behaviour.

The GR55 is Roland’s fourth (?) generation guitar synth.  It succeeded the GR33, which I had, and is a big step up.  With the exception of the piano sounds which are very glitchy, all the sounds track superbly.

All three units require a power amp and speakers or can be run through guitar amps or better, a desk and pa.  All three can be updated using firmware downloaded from the internet and loaded using USB or midi.  Firmware updates offer both new sounds but also performance improvements and a strongly recommended.  Online patch exchanges exist for all three too, but in my experience you really have to hunt for good patches – most are for bedroom players.

In use

The Axe-Fx is an amazing piece of kit.  Having owned one for five years, I’ve got to know it pretty well and it can do almost anything an amp and effects units can.  It’s unbelievably editable and controllable and the graphical PC- or Mac-based editor makes editing the multitude of parameters much easier than its own small green screen.

The onboard time-based/modulation effects are as good as anything else on the market almost regardless of price.  Really expensive and lush-sounding.

But all that said, it doesn’t sound or feel quite like a tube amp even when played through a good tube power amp and dedicated guitar speakers.  It does processed clean and more heavily overdriven sounds better than anything else I’ve used, but is less convincing in the middle ground of mild overdrive/volume control playing.  Hence its widespread adoption by metal bands, some of whom have even eschewed their backline, which will be popular with their road crews!

I’ve tried an Axe-Fx II and it’s better but did not, for me, justify the additional outlay.  Fractal’s customer service is also legendary, my only slight disappointment being that makers Fractal Audio stopped supporting the original Axe-Fx’s when they introduced the mkII.  I would have expected them to offer ongoing firmware uprgrades and new amp models, albeit only once they had been offered to current mkII owners.

The Pod X3 Pro is much cheaper and sounds like it.  Everything sounds compressed in one way or another.  It lack real ‘spring’, ‘punch’ and headroom.  Very ‘bedroom’ sounding.

It also has a key shortcoming, which is that it is not possible to control parameters in both channels of a two-channel patch in real time with many of the foot controllers on the market as they only transmit on one channel at a time and the X3 Pro requires two.

I was one of their very first UK customers and a keen advocate in their early years so I was really disappointed at Line 6’s reaction to my challenge of this which eventually became quite hostile as I pressed my point.  Eventually, and no thanks whatsoever to them, I overcame this major shortcoming (especially when playing live), by going to the added expense of a Midi Solutions Event Processor, which can map commands from one channel to multiple channels.

On the positive side, the X3 Pro can interface and control a Line 6 Variax modelling guitar via a Cat5 cable, so with some programing effort you can in theory switch from a ‘Tele through a chorus and a Blackface Twin’ to a ‘Les Paul though a Marshall Stack’ with a single touch of your foot.  But in reality, the sounds are not good enough to make this worthwhile and it quickly becomes a novelty.  The best thing about the Line 6 Variax guitars is not their modelled sounds but the fact that they’re noiseless and have no magnetic pickups to gather hum!

The X3 Pro’s online editor and patch library are pretty good, though not up to the Axe-Fx’s pro standard.

The GR55 is the odd man out here as it’s a less comprehensive preamp/fx but adds a synth. By combining a straight through guitar path, a stripped-down version of Roland’s COSM guitar modelling from its VG88 product and two synth sources, it can cover a remarkable spread of bases.  It’s a floorboard format and can also act as a foot controller for midi-enabled amps and effects.

In use, Roland’s COSM modelling is pretty good – certainly as good if not better than the X3 Pro’s, if not quite as good as the Axe-Fx’s.  By going into its routing you can combine the real and modelled signal paths and create a pretty credible sort of two-channel/bi-amped patch.

And then you can go really crazy and add synth sounds too, some of which are fantastic as long as you don’t go overboard with the mix!

It too has a downloadable editor which is very easy to use – important when you’re editing synth parameters which make guitar ones like child’s play.  And the online patch library and support are good too.  I was trying to create a credible Arabic Flute and found other online users really helpful.

(I’ve only encountered only one drawback with GR55 – its predecessor GR33 could be triggered by an external midi source like a keyboard, whereas the GR55 only works with a hex pickup source like a Roland-ready Fender Strat or the like).

Conclusion

So you’ve probably already guessed that I’m keeping the Axe-Fx and the GR55 but ditching the X3 Pro.  Next step is to acquire a Kemper modelling rack preamp, another different and complementary approach to creating sounds….

This just in to audition – a new boost with eq.  Lovely pale gold hammerite finish too.

With two controls labelled ‘bloom’ and ‘voice’, I’m expecting some interesting tones from my amps!  More soon…

I really wasn’t in the market for another guitar and then this fella came up.  A fairly early James Trussart Holey Steelcaster from 2003.

I missed out on one about eight years ago, didn’t move quickly enough and always kinda regretted it.  I’ve always preferred the original Steelcasters.  I don’t think the treatment works as well on Les Pauls (aka the SteelPaul), nor am I so keen on the way Trussarts have gone more recently, with fancy finishes/engraving and latterly distressed paintjobs.

They usually have great necks and this one certainly does.  Brilliant player and what a look.  Better pix coming soon…

..actually I’ve had it for a week but I’ve been down with the ‘flu ever since it arrived.

I must have been ill if it prevented me from playing a new toy. It’s a fab amp.  Small, light and sounds sublime with everything I’ve stuck through it so far.  Loves the 335. Quite middly tone, very warm.

Basically a modern take on the classic tweed deluxe, handbuilt by amp guru Jesse Hoff in leafy Surrey.

It has four inputs, low and higher gain normal and bright and with Lazy J’s VAC power scaling it can go from decent headroom to pretty overdriven.  Very effective single tone control, switchable mid-boost and a bass cut switch on the chassis for removing humbucker ‘flub’.

Can’t wait to do a blues gig with this one!

…four days to go!