Line 6 spiders

Does anyone else think that these are the most crappy and cheesy sounding amps on the market?

yes. i h8 them. tubes, solids, all. the high ends are o.k. but over priced. i think the sound out of them sounds so fake....so...in a can.

I have a model 1 crate, it's in a wooden crate.........it's kinda like this one

http://www.chrisguitars.com/crate-cr110.jpg

it pretty much sucks too

If you're not a tone-nazi, which most people seem to be, they're fine.

Well, the Spider Tube I played sounded good.

i would not call myself a nazi but i have a thing for that tweed and blackface tone. I don't care much for the over driven tone.

True, true.

some ppl seem to love line6 and some ppl hate them.. like bc rich

No way guys! They're awesome! :D It just depends on what sound you're trying to make, I can get an amazing Jazz tone out of this amp.

Though I might choose a Peavey over the Spider III, but you never know, I might get both. I think they're great.

I don't really like them, but I haven't tried them much. When I did, it just sounded very muddy and overly-scooped.

It was the Spider III, fifteen watts I think.

They're not as bad as some people make them out to be though. It sounds way better than my Ibanez starter amp.

That's fair enough. I never did like small amps, I just don't think they do the sound any justice. It's the bigger ones that are able to express the right tone.

Yeah, I think some people just go over the top when they say things like that. There are a lot worse creations than the Spiders.

no. line6 amps are really good. my friend got one and it really sounds good....

some ppl seem to love line6 and some ppl hate them.. like bc rich

bc rich amps are good? do they even have amps, i have only seen the one that come in packs

The 150 watt Spider III (and some smaller ones, I assume) have song presets on them, which is pretty cool. If you want to play a certain song, you can switch right to it and achieve a sound nearly identical to the original.

i meant their guitars

Line 6 has much better products than the Spider. Try some of their other solid states (some of which are good).

I have a Spider that never gets played because my other amps are just far superior.

ya so its maybe the Spider that sux but line6 does have better products.
'Bodom i thought your were talking about the amps. ya bc rich guitars are awesome

Some more input: they don't sound as bad at low volumes. Still really thing, but just not awful. It's when you crank them your soul starts crying.

i think the tube spiders sound nice but thats about it

Sorry, but i have to veto. There are some really good bands there who use Line6, and I got one myself, and i think you can get crazy sounds out of it. I bought it of a friend, and i got the 150 watt one with preset sounds of different bands. And you can get some really cool sounds. And I like Line6 because you can get a pretty fun "electronic sound" like the band muse uses from time to time. So well, maybe not everyone's thing, but i quite like them

the Line6...I personally agree with you guys on the overly electronic sound they give, but it's not always a bad thing. its all about what you like for your tone and sound. not everybody is going to like your tone, but that's how it goes, you can't force it on them.

Well said, Case.

Well I've noticed that a lot of people who play clean guitar like solid state amps because It's ability to duplicate clean tube amp tone is relatively successful vs duplicating high gain tube amp tone.

For high gain there is no way you can't hear the horrible distortion decay in a line 6.

And like Tele pointed out earlier, you can't get classic tones like Tweed and Blues in solid state/dgital without buying a $1000 rack processor.

I have a Flextone II plus, a Spider II and a HD147 half stack. I really like the line 6 amps, but the spider is on the low end of the list. I've had my HD147 about 4 years and I still love it.

the simpler the better, imo.

when i grab an amp what o look for = the least crap between the speaker and the Plank. (and i prefer an open back); and unless its a Fender Twin Reverb, i really don't want over 50-watts (although i do have a Crate 120 2x12). Thanks to a student of mine i can play my early 80's 30-watt Blues Cube again.

BUT
...And, as has been said ad-nausium : TO EACH HIS/HER OWN

Still, imo, anything that 'models' another amp is kinda like some inside joke I'll never get. i mean hellfire if I was going to make an amp from scratch, with unlimited resources, i'd want it to sound like MY amp and not 'model' a Fender, Vox, Marshall, etc... imo thats silly as hell.

and , imo, the truest tone = the shortest signal-path. period.
same goes for pedals .. i'm finally able to reduce from 7-pedals to 5, counting the stomp-tuner and BBE (1st gen) sonic Stomp.

lastly, imo, "tone" = my fingers on my guitar through my amp. no amount of signal processing will turn you into Jeff Beck-ETC as their tone follows that same process.

all that being said, someone please send me a 1967 Fender Vibrolux....
Please?

and , as always...
RAWK!
Cs

PS(just remembered)


no but you can buy the amp! (and cheaper that the rack)!
so ... you could buy me, lol, my 1967 Fender Vibrolux and i'll let ya know how it stacks up, PLEASE? ...aw c'mon)

@carlsnow

well said man, that's why I don't like to use modelling AMPS at all, but for my recording chain you'd be surprised...
I have an rp90 multi effect which I use as a pickup simulator(EQ basically) and maybe some light time FX and delay. But really I rely more on my pedals distortion at the lowest setting possible(which my tone= Plexi at level 1) running through my amps clean channel(which reacts like a tube amp breaking up after 12 o'clock, on 10(which adds more distortion to the channel, and in turn adds more charateristics of a real amp instead of just the straight pedal.

So my guitar sounds rely more on adding a little bit of the Plexi, JCM, etc. character going into my amp rather than just straight distortion from the pedal's amp model. It somehow creates a more realistic amp sound...

I don't think that makes sense... I just got my wisdom teeth pulled out and I am still feeling the anesthesia!

@case211
Have you looked in the peavey ReValver mkIII for recording? That coupled with Line 6 POD farm for effects and some of the amps is actually pretty decent. I just had a trial version of the Peavey software, but what I heard was pretty good and you have the option to build your own amps. I'm using POD farm right now and its ok, but I want the peavey software too. What's your recording setup?

welcome to the forum by the way :)

and I'm on hydrocodone and still feeling the anesthesia from my surgery this morning(wisdom teeth) so I'm going to try to make some sense out of this:

I run my guitar through a couple of pedals right into my amp and depending on the time of day and who is or isn't home I either use the headphone out on my amp or I mic it and go that route.

More specifically I run my Squier Strat through my Big Muff Pi Deluxe* into my RP90 and into my amp.

Even more of a breakdown:
The BMPD is rarely used for most of my rhythm stuff, mainly used to achieve a Randy Rhoads type of tone when using some different settings, but really only used for more of a sustaining type of distortion on solos.
Most of the time its not being used
Now I go from the BMPD into my RP90(Digitech product, pretty good for a multi purpose pedal). I typically only use a few different things for recording. Because my Ibanez has yet to be intonated, I have relied heavily on my strat(which I played around the neck's truss rod and it play beautfully now) which has a single coil instead of the humbucker sound I want with my more distorted sounds, so I use a pickup simulator which just adds an EQ curve to it before anything else, and then I don't really use any EQ'ing unless I want more bark in the mids, after that I use a Plexi model on the lowest amount of distortion to give it more of a certain character that I want, then I run about 100 ms of delay on slapback and that's about it.
So it looks like this:
Guitar->Big Muff Pi Deluxe->RP90->Hughes and Kettner 15-R(Clean channel breaks up after 5 like a tube amp so I run it on 10, see above post for why)->headphone out OR mic'd amp->Garageband

That's about all of it, I have 2 other pedals that I don't use because they are standard overdrive pedals as well.
btw the * means that this pedal was only made between 1978-1981(?). IT is vintage Big Muff Fuzz going on, and its got a built in compressor with it. That thing is my baby for pedals!

Cool. Can Garageband use vst or rtas plugins? I use Protools and a 003 rack. If you can use plugins, and you want to, check out the demo version of the Peavey Revalver software. Its pretty cool. The cool thing about recording with a software plugin is that you can change all the amp settings later just by turning knobs instead of having to re-record everything. Its truly amazing. And you can EQ your guitars direct signal before the amp modeler like you are with your digitech, but a plugin EQ will give you much more control. You will need a fairly fast computer to do this without latency. I have no experience with Garageband, but Protools is a fairly heavy program. I had to build a quad core PC to handle it.

Hope you recover soon from your de-toothing. It wasn't very fun when I had mine done a few years ago. I had all 4 wisdom teeth, plus 3 around them that they destroyed all pulled at once. I know your pain...don't those stitches in there bug the crap out of you!

lol I've been on a hazy drug induced high/sleep most of the day, so I'm not feeling a whole lot right now, thanks though. :D

I used to run guitar->garageband(i have a crappy mac right now, it will close Itunes unexepectedly!)
And it has built in features like amp models(Fender, Vox, Mesa/Boogie, Marshall, etc.) and many stomp box effect "pedals" now. It worked ok, but it was a pain to get the lowest amount of latency in the program to produce my guitar sound. I literally had to close every single thing open to get it to be around .1 ms off of the original signal(Don't know the accuracy of the numbers there, but, oh well). i have looked into computer based stuff like the ones that gibson and them make... ummmm... AH! what are they called? anyways, there the two biggest ones in the computer based modeling industry... I want to get one of those if I have to move out of state to go to college, and they seem pretty cool... I'll give the peavey program a look too.

I don't think that GB can run plugins(which made me sad) but I will hopefully be able to get my hands on a new(er) desktop by the time I graduate and be able to run heavier programs like Peavey ReValver. I heard one of those things from Amplitube(I just remembered) and man it sounded sweet!

Well, I'm finally going to get something to eat/drink after over 12 hours of not(Soup Broth). and then more painkillers and more sleep!

Also if your interested I have a soundclick.com profile where I have a few tunes uploaded, they can show you what my cleaner guitar sounds are(for recording).
just go to soundclick.com/case211 if you want to check them out, plus, my "Azules en España" is #13 in Blues General today!(out of over 15,000)

So, do you have any other programs you've tried before that were decent for computer based stuff?

I have the Line6 Spider lll. 15 Watt
Its not overdone. Youve got Complete controll. Just play with the settings, presets, built in effects, and OVERDRIVE (drive knob) and you can get almost ANY Tone/sound

@case211
I have only tried amplitube, podfarm (formerly gear box) and peavey revalver. Digidesign (who makes Protools) also has one called Eleven (reminds me of spinal tap...lol) and I heard Motley Crue (sp?) used it on their new album. Its supposed to be really good.

If you would like to try a program other than GB take a look at Magix Music Studio (I think its called) I used it before Protools and it can use VST plugins and works a lot like Protools. You can edit and automate mixes with crossfades and volume changes and loads of other stuff. It has reverb, eq and compressor plugins in it already. They are usable, but there are better plugs out there. Its only 80 bucks or so. Magix and a Firewire interface will go a long way.

Latency can be beaten if you record at a faster sample rate. 44.1k is standard and what all music on CDs runs at. If you record at a faster rate say, 48k or 96k there will be less latency, but you have to 'bounce' or mix down your mix so it can be converted back to 44.1k before you put it on a cd. Or it will be played back very slow. In Protools latency is effected by the sample rate and the hardware playback buffer. To figure your latency it is playback buffer divided by your sample rate. So a sample rate of 44.1 and playback buffer of 256k would be 5.80ms. So at 96k and a playback of 128k would be 1.33ms and I can't really hear it. I'm not sure if you can change these settings in GB or not. It also depends on your hardware if you can record at higher sample rates. The bigger the playback buffer = the less taxing on your computer. Hope this helps. Feel free to PM or email me if you have any questions. I think I officially high jacked this thread!