QUICK START GUIDE • Introduction
1 • 4
So, how does POD
XT Live help you create a guitar tone that is out of this world, and
then get that tone wherever you need it? Easy! It’s…
Modeling
Modeling: just what is it, and why is it so important?
To answer that question, we’ll start with tubes (better know as “valves” to our friends
in England and elsewhere). Tubes, we can all agree, are the heart and soul of pretty
much every legendary guitar amp, and are key to 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, Line 6’s team of crack engineer-guitarists has spent years understanding
pretty much everything there is to know about tube-powered gear, including 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, what happens when the signal gets to other parts of the system —
complicated stuff, but all analyzable as electronic data. A guitar pickup output, after
all, is an electronic signal, and tubes and all the rest are really just a complex form of
signal processing.
Having sussed it all out, the Line 6 engineers translated all this arcane knowledge
into software that simulates the signal processing of guitar amps’ tubes and other
electronics, entirely within the digital domain. Cool, huh? The Line 6 crew also
directed their caffeine-enhanced modeling attention to a study of guitar speaker
cabinets and the important part they play in communicating great guitar tone. And
the great variety of stomp box and rack effects that guitarists use to juice things up.
They translated it all into yet more powerful software, and it’s this revolutionary DSP
(Digital Signal Processing) software-based modeling technology that gives Line 6 the
power to create super silicon-based life forms like POD
XT Live.
PODxt Live Man Book RevA.book Page 4 Monday, June 21, 2004 5:29 PM
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