I love my Line 6 Vetta Guitar Amp! It allows me to have so many different tones for XONE’s original songs. After 6 years of owning my Vetta HD (ver2.50), one of the most important aspects of understanding how to get great tone from any Vetta, is understanding just how subjective the Vetta really is. Whatever you plug into the Vetta is crucial to the signal chain, and no 2 guitar models sound alike thru it. I recently found out just how true this is.
For Christmas, I decided to have my identical Ibanez RG1570 Guitars intonated and setup again, since it had been about 3 years since my last. I took my guitars to a guy with a great reputation. What a mistake!! Unfortunately, he did not fully understand Ibanez guitars’ Necks and Trems, and the guitars were returned to me completely out of whack. $200 dollars and 5 months later, I’ve finally gotten both guitars back to where they were before.
The subjectivity of the guitars’ setup directly affected all of the original patches I had tweaked for XONE’s original songs. When I first got the guitars back, all of my patches sounded horrible. Besides having two other pros setup the guitars, I had to work on those 2 Ibanez guitars until I could get them back to where they were before they were set up incorrectly. My “classic” original XONE Vetta patches helped me do this. I continued to tweak away at the guitars, using my patches as the measuring stick.
During the process, the Vetta’s tone went from super crappy fizzy back to full-bodied warm and expressive as I altered the bridge pickup, pickup pole pieces, and trem height. I heard so many variations of my tried and true patches as I tweaked along, that I really heard the subjectivity of the Vetta in its entirety. Finally returning the guitars to their previous setup and hearing those tones that I loved so much again, was such a relief!!
It was 5 months of Vetta HELL!! Thank God, I’m back to getting awesome tone out of an amp I love!
It really matters what you plug into the Vetta, and how that guitar is setup. If the pickups are too close to the strings, the Vetta’s amp models will sound fizzy. If the pickups are too far away from the strings, the Vetta’s amp models will sound too thin. It is a finite area that sounds brilliant thru the Vetta. Forget what you think the pickup height should be, use your ears to determine how your pickups best utilize the amp models in the Vetta. Otherwise, you haven’t really heard how much body those amp models have…
