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:
- 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!
- 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.
- Keep your guitar volume just below full, depending on how hot are your pickup output, it may saturate your amp faster.
- 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.
- Start with an amp that is capable of producing stellar cleans.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Keep the Exciter, EQ and Compressor settings reasonable. When pushed hard, the Post FX can create distortion.
- 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.
- 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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