INTRODUCTION: FLEXTONE! MEET THE FLEXTONE....
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INTRODUCTION
FLEXTONE! MEET THE FLEXTONE....
Thank you for buying a Flextone, the flexible Digital Guitar Amplifier System
with the killer tone (and you were wondering how we came up with the name).
There’s a bunch of stuff we have to talk about and only a few pages to do it in, so
let’s get started.
What makes the Flextone so different from every other guitar amp? It’s...
MODELING
Modeling: just what is it, and why is it so important? (By the way, you sent in that
registration card or did it on the web, right? OK, just checking.)
Tubes, we can all agree, are the heart and soul of every legendary guitar amp and
are responsible for the warm, harmonic-rich tone quality of those amps. Solid state
devices (transistors) are simply unable to duplicate tube warmth and performance.
And “hybrids” – a tube in a circuit along with a bunch of transistors – are really a
vain attempt at warming up a transistor-based tone. They fall short in any
comparison to a 100% tube circuit. So that’s it – tubes or nothin’, right? Well, not
any more....
You see, the engineers at Line 6, being an adventurous lot, and totally pumped
about this whole guitar tone thing as well, decided to stock up on the coffee, bust
out the engineering equipment, and get down to learning everything there is to
know about tubes. Riding high on the caffeine wave, they began a three-year
project to analyze and map out exactly how different types of tubes respond under
various conditions typical of guitar amplifier design. How tubes process an input
signal, how the signal is colored and shaped, at what point it begins to distort, the
quality and characteristic of the distortion – complicated stuff, but all analyzable
as electronic data. A guitar pickup output, after all, is an electronic signal, and
tubes are really just a complex form of signal processing.
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