Was I wrong about the Tech 21 Blonde cleans? [Archive]

Wildwind

May 18th, 2012, 09:55 PM

I had stated earlier that the Blonde was not capable of producing high-quality clean Fender tones. There seemed to be artifacts (for lack of a better tone) in the tone. These went away or were masked when driven. Now I have proven myself wrong (preferable to having one of you guys do it).

So my OCD brain got to thinking about this and I felt maybe I was hasty and needed to play some more. At first, the knobs were not my friend (it was set to blend with the HD500’s Twin model) and it sounded truly lousy. More knob turning just made it worse and I was thinking this was a bad idea. Then I did some radical moves with the Character and Drive knobs, turned the bass and mids down a bit, and added a bit of treble. As many of you know, the tone knobs in these things are very powerful and a little goes a long ways.

I ended up with these settings:
Low just left of noon
Mid at noon
High at about 3:00
Character at about 8:30
Drive at 10:00

(If any of you have favored settings you’d care to share, you have my attention.)

I may do some more tweaking, but I’ve tested this with my various overdrives (there are five on this board – hey, if one is good, then five is way better, right?) and it sounds fantastic. Great feel and punch out of my QSC K10.

And now I’ve totally turned off the Twin model in the HD and am running the Blonde as my amp and speaker sim. The HD will just be an interface (and way overkill but it’s what I have).

The hybrid setup, combining the Blonde with the HD500, did sound good. But I was still getting some digital junk (I honestly don’t know what it was – but it’s gone now!) that I was overlooking. Hence my flirtation with the Ethos and AxeFX. Tonight I decided I will not jump through hoops to buy an Ethos, which I was doing mainly to get rid of the digital junk that most of the modelers haven’t quite dialed out yet.

You do have to re-trim your mixer, as the Blonde’s output is well below the HD’s. Since I run direct at church too, I’ll have to get the attention of the sound guy. No biggie and I think the resultant sound will be well worth it. This whole process didn’t last 10 minutes including testing the overdrives (all of which needed to be tweaked a bit, but again with great results).

I hope this is of interest to many of you and that it generates some comments.


	Telecaster Guitar Forum > Other Discussion Forums > Worship Service Players > Was I wrong about the Tech 21 Blonde cleans? PDA Was I wrong about the Tech 21 Blonde cleans? Wildwind May 18th, 2012, 09:55 PM I had stated earlier that the Blonde was not capable of producing high-quality clean Fender tones. There seemed to be artifacts (for lack of a better tone) in the tone. These went away or were masked when driven. Now I have proven myself wrong (preferable to having one of you guys do it). So my OCD brain got to thinking about this and I felt maybe I was hasty and needed to play some more. At first, the knobs were not my friend (it was set to blend with the HD500’s Twin model) and it sounded truly lousy. More knob turning just made it worse and I was thinking this was a bad idea. Then I did some radical moves with the Character and Drive knobs, turned the bass and mids down a bit, and added a bit of treble. As many of you know, the tone knobs in these things are very powerful and a little goes a long ways. I ended up with these settings: Low just left of noon Mid at noon High at about 3:00 Character at about 8:30 Drive at 10:00 (If any of you have favored settings you’d care to share, you have my attention.) I may do some more tweaking, but I’ve tested this with my various overdrives (there are five on this board – hey, if one is good, then five is way better, right?) and it sounds fantastic. Great feel and punch out of my QSC K10. And now I’ve totally turned off the Twin model in the HD and am running the Blonde as my amp and speaker sim. The HD will just be an interface (and way overkill but it’s what I have). The hybrid setup, combining the Blonde with the HD500, did sound good. But I was still getting some digital junk (I honestly don’t know what it was – but it’s gone now!) that I was overlooking. Hence my flirtation with the Ethos and AxeFX. Tonight I decided I will not jump through hoops to buy an Ethos, which I was doing mainly to get rid of the digital junk that most of the modelers haven’t quite dialed out yet. You do have to re-trim your mixer, as the Blonde’s output is well below the HD’s. Since I run direct at church too, I’ll have to get the attention of the sound guy. No biggie and I think the resultant sound will be well worth it. This whole process didn’t last 10 minutes including testing the overdrives (all of which needed to be tweaked a bit, but again with great results). I hope this is of interest to many of you and that it generates some comments.