How to Achieve a Great Clean Tone With a Torpedo Captor or Captor X?

How to Achieve a Great Clean Tone With a Torpedo Captor or Captor X?

The clean channel on most amps generates some distortion, even if it's just a little bit. It's there even if you don't hear it through a regular cabinet. When using a Torpedo device, especially with headphones, you may be subjected to what we call the "magnifier effect": hearing your sound so close and dry will root your focus on many tiny details that you usually don't notice.

If you want a stellar clean tone you need to take into account - and act upon - the following key factors:
  1. When using your amp and the Torpedo for the first time, the instinct is to turn the amp volume up to hit that "sweet spot". Don't do it! 
  2. Keep the master volume down, keep the preamp gain down, keep the loadbox or line input level to somewhere around -12db and don't allow the output volume to clip. When clipping occurs, a message will be displayed on the Torpedo screen.
  3. Keep your guitar volume just below full, depending on how hot are your pickup output, it may saturate your amp faster.
  4. Keep your mid and especially the treble controls fairly flat. When the mid and treble controls are increased the amps harmonic distortion usually becomes more audible.
  5. Start with an amp that is capable of producing stellar cleans.
  6. Make sure that the power amp modelling section of your Torpedo device is OFF if you are using a real amplifier, or keep it to a low volume (below 10dB) if you are using a preamplifier.
  7. Adjust the microphone distance if using the Two notes virtual cabinets, otherwise, you are dependent on the limits of a Static IR. When on axis, condenser microphones will emphasise the distortion within the clean tone.
  8. Make sure your mix is set at 100% wet, meaning 100% speaker sim. Dry will introduce an unfiltered tone and you will hear all the tiny distortions of your clean tone happening in the upper-high frequencies.
  9. The Overload parameter will produce distortion (it is the actual distortion happening in a loudspeaker when pushed hard); therefore, keep it at a low level or OFF.
  10. Keep the Exciter, EQ and Compressor settings reasonable. When pushed hard, the Post FX can create distortion.
  11. If using digital in/out (S/PDIF or AES/EBU if available on your device) make sure your interface and the Torpedo device are at the same sync frequency - i.e. 44.1, 48 or 96kHz. If the sync is not established, you will hear some clicking noise from time to time.
  12. When it's possible, it's a good exercise to compare a "real" miking of your usual cabinet with what you can achieve with your Torpedo device.

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