Rehearsing with a Boss GT-8

[TheDarkProject]

Hello all,

When our band rehearses, I have a Pod XT Live and the other guitarist has a Boss GT-8. We run them through the clean channel on the stacks and use the effects units' distortion, etc. However, while my Pod XT sounds just fine this way, his GT-8 often sounds awful, with massive amounts of feedback and squealing. It's better if you don't have any overdrive effect enabled, but still pretty bad. We thought it might just be his pickups, but when we swap guitars and run my Epiphone with stock passive pickups through his setup, it's pretty much the same.

I'm aware that the Line 6 amp modelling is generally considered better than the GT-8's, but I wouldn't have expected it to have been more difficult to get reasonable levels out of. Is this a known issue? Or perhaps he's just missed some vital setting? (He has it set to stack output, is using the right output jack on the back, and has tried with the output level up full as recommended, and also lower.) Perhaps it really only works well in the send/return loop (if you're lucky enough to have one on your amp - we don't)?

I'm not much of a techie so I'm just speculating. But any thoughts on the matter would be appreciated!

 

[Symbiant]

did u try playing it in your amp at all with your guitar?

I would return it..

 

[slashvanyoung]

Theoretically this works totally fine. Did you check the gain on the clean channel of the amp? This should be fairly low or it will distort your signal even further (duh?). Also turn of the speaker simulation or it will sound absolutely horrible!

 

[ParsonsMatt]

I had NO luck trying to get a decent tone out of the BOss GT-8. I'd recommend just running amp distortion.

 

[TheDarkProject]

The output was set to 'Stack Amp', so the speaker simulation would have been off. I checked and gain was down to minimum, eq was neutral, etc. I had the same settings on mine with the Pod XT Live and that sounded perfect.

To be fair it sounds a bit noisy even via Line-in and out through a hi-fi. I get the impression that the amp simulation - and perhaps the overdrive effect, because that really made it a lot worse - are just not very good?

If he can't get a decent sound out of it then he'll probably just get some Pod derivative, since it's apparent they can work fine for this purpose.