Music Thing: Line6's PODxt Live

Tom Whitwell of Music Thing, our favorite pro music gear blog, is contributing a new column highlighting the best of what's coming out these days. Here's his first one, about Live6's new PODxt Live:

The bad thing about technology is that, these days, everyone has it. Back in the 80s, you had to be Andy Summers or some guy from Pink Floyd to have a huge custom-built effects board with loads of pedals and switches. But Line6 are about to announce PODxt Live, a digital pedal board that contains the sounds of 36 vintage guitar amps and a bag full of retro pedals. For £399. So everyone can have one.

Line6 are the Dyson of the music-gear world. Guitarists are a stone-aged bunch. The vast majority of new guitars are copies of designs from the late 40's and early 50's, and the hottest thing in high-end amps is hand-wiring (circuit boards are just too high-tech).

So Line6 are different. They were founded by a couple of synth designers. Their CEO is a former professional trumpet player who worked at Apple for 11 years. In 1996 they invented modelling guitar amps, which use digital processing to capture the essence of a 1966 Fuzz Face pedal or a 1968 Marshall stack. The technology is simple, and incredibly complicated. The output of the guitar is digitised, run through some algorithms, then turned back into an analog signal to feed into your headphones (or whatever). The algorithms are the clever (and secret) bit.

Modelling is a black art, a baffling combination of maths and computing and listening to loads of priceless vintage music kit. It?s also very controversial. Old-school studio engineers and guitarists say it?s mathematically impossible to capture the interactions between a vibrating string, a magnetic pickup, several stages of amplification and a battered speaker in a wooden box. Line6 model the guitar amp in chunks – the pre-amp, the power-amp, the speaker.

Other manufacturers model every component; each capacitor, each resistor, each transformer, individually. That?s how Korg recently recreated their geek-tastic MS20 analog synth as software. At the highest end of modelling, Focusrite?s
?2,200 ?Liquid Channel? combines digital modelling with a huge bank of relays, resistors and capacitors to recreate the interaction between the microphone and the amp. Old school engineers really hate that.

In a similar old-school-baiting move Line6 attacked the guitar itself in 2003, with the Variax (Vary Axe, get it?) – a weirdly bland-looking guitar with no visible pickups and a body stuffed with digital processors and software to reproduce the sound of 30 vintage guitars. It?s been successful enough to increase sales of the original guitars it models.

This new pedalboard sure is sexy, but guitarists are terribly conflicted by Line6. To get access to all the great sounds, we have to abandon everything we love. We don? t need the overheating tubes, battered 30 year-old guitars and wonky hand-built pedals. But we still love them.