Pod XT Pro Help!!!

[veronicafalls]

I've been messing with levels an eq with pod farm to get a metalcore sound, and am getting this ugly picking sound that stands out when I palm mute. or am I just not playing tight enough?

currently I am using tube screamer (drive 40%, gain 61%, tone 50%) with the cali diamond plate (drive 52%, bass 96%, mid 36%, treble 85%, presence 78%, volume 46%). And I cut eq at 50hz so I can eliminate the nonsense woof noises from the amp sim.

http://soundclick.com/share?songid=8196728

thanks a lot guys.
And please tell me anything you may suggest.

 

[Harry Hughes]

Way too much bass on the amp sim there.
Not sure what you mean about picking sound, pick attack?

 

[veronicafalls]

I'm just saying it seems way to noisy to me for some reason

 

[denizdurdag]

I couldn't hear a disturbing picking noise but you may try to drop the drive on the Tubescreamer. There is a rattling/sizzling noise indicative of higher gain than needed.

And there is too much bass.

 

[onqel]

40%drive on tubescreamer + 51%drive on diamondplate = mess..

 

[Sean in Silence]

50hz doesn't seem like it would be an effective frequency to remove in order to remove the woofiness from the cab sim

 

[narcossintese]

There´s loads of nasty high pitched hiss on POD Farm. Filters on 100hz and 12Khz helps me a lot. IMO palm mutes are biggest problem on amp sims. Have you tried using impulses?

 

[ahjteam]

My guess is that you don't have the guitars in context and you boost the low end too much, and/or your tones are ovelapping too much and because of that it just starts to sound like shit. I didn't spend too much time on this one, it's just a demo with midi drums, bass guitar and double guitars playing this super simple D# E F# progression in drop C tuning. First two styles of open playing, then two styles of muted playing, hope it gives you an idea: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/1338211/mix/mixdown.wav

And here it is broken down:
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/1338211/mix/guitars.wav
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/1338211/mix/bass.wav
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/1338211/mix/drums.wav

As you can hear, the guitars are REALLY thin, but because you have this bass that sounds like a monstertruck, it give you the nice and round bottom end and glues the performances together, while the guitars stay pretty clear. The guitar chain has four plugins in it:

1) Pod Farm
- Noise gate (treshold set so that it kills the noise, decay 30%)
- Screamer (drive 20%, gain and tone 100%)
- Treadplate Dual (drive 75%, bass 0%, middle 50%, treble 60%, presence 75%, volume 100%), cab 4x12 2001 Treadplate, Room 50%, 57 on axis

2) JB Ferox tapesim (to make the digitalness of podfarm less apparent)
otherwise default except
- Low cut 120hz
- Highcut 8500hz
- Saturation 30%
- Hysterisis 0%
- Output level 0dB

3) Waves C1-SC (to kill the excess woof)
- Load depopper preset, but change the frequency to 160 and set threshold so that it cuts ~9dB

4) EQ
- Highpass at 110hz, -6dB @ 425hz (semi narrow Q)

 

[Harry Hughes]

Personally I don't think the guitars need to sound THAT thin as the example AH gave us, going as far to set the bass to 0 per cent on the amp sim, but at any rate it's better than 96 per cent.
I tend to give my POD Patch about 70 per cent bass and some other fairly extreme settings (but I keep the drive lowish, around 65 per cent because my pickups are pretty high output), but via the 4 band semi parametric EQ included in the POD/POD Farm I cut various frequencies more specifically.
With the 4 band, don't worry about anything below 100 Hz, that will be taken care of via a high pass filter, so I tend to set around 300-350 Hz for one band (cuts the wooliness out), 650-800Hz for another band (cuts out any excess "honking" sounding mids, should you need to do so), 1.5-3KHz (tames excess pick attack and scratchy-ness)and cut around 5 KHz or higher (to kill the excess brightness)
Exact frequencies depend on what particular amp sim you use, but these are fairly good guidelines for Diamond Plate and Big Bottom.