Re: Guitar Amp Modelers
If you pull it out of context like that, then I'm pretty sure that I'd get heavily flamed. The axe-fx does sound great.
In a studio you can 'stop the tape' and tweak your settings to perfection or even do re-amping if there is something you need to tweak afterwards.
But on a live show you can't just stop the band to start tweaking your settings. Sure, you have presets but they can only take you so far...
Playing guitar with stomps is just like mixing sound on a desk. You can't just use a preset to mix a band and leave it there because you need to adjust to the current playing due to different factors at that specific time...
While you can certainly add controllers to your axe-fx, pod, gt-xxx, etc... You don't have immidiate access to all of those knobs that you are used to having on your stomp boxes. On a simple stomp setup you may have five pedals with four knobs. That is twenty continous controllers!
And you can assign a couple of them to a couple of two or three continous controllers but you won't see many guitarists lay out twenty or so of them on the stage floor. This is a big limitation in my view and is shared by many of my peers...
The closest thing I've seen that combine modelling and pedals is the line6 m13/9/5-range of stomp modelling. They give you six knobs for each stomp plus stomp switches.
And this is why I think that most modellers like, axe-fx, line6, boss, etc lacks live. Not because of how it sounds, but the way how many of us want to interact with the tools at hand while performing.
