Quick Start Guide
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How does PODxt 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 dif-
ferent 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 elec-
tronic 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 caf-
feine-enhanced modeling attention to a study of guitar speaker cabinets and the impor-
tant 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 PODxt Live.
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