Thoughts on Line 6 products

So, I own a Line 6 Spider IV 150HD guitar amplifier.



Now, there's a lot of hate out there in the professional audio community for Line 6, and I can understand why. They're not exactly cheap, and by default, they tend to sound pretty rubbish.

The thing is though, I quite like mine. It may be because I have the top-end "head" model, but the settings can be customised to within an inch of their life. As I explained in my introductory video, if you put the time in - if you put the time in, they can sound great. Well, maybe not great, but pretty good, at least.

I think the problem stems from the fact that yes, they seem to ship with rubbish presets, and that it takes ages to dial in a sound that you want. I've had mine for five or six years now, and although I admittedly don't use it as often as I'd like, it's taken me this long to get a sound out of it that I like... and even then, I'm still tweaking it it for the best possible sound. For example, for the Desmodus reunion in 2016, I discovered (onstage, mid-show) that what sounded great for the low-volume practice sessions resulted in all of the feedback while playing at concert volumes, and not even nice feedback at that. Add in the fact that the really thick and crunchy tone that sounded brilliant during practice sounded kinda muddy at high volume, and I had a problem on my hands. With the foot controller, I was able to mitigate the feedback issue, but I wasn't able to do anything about the tone, because that takes fiddling.

This fiddling process takes hours to do, and there's a buttload of trial and error involved. It's not like flipping the switch on your Mesa Boogie or Marshall or whatever and you almost instantly have a great tone. You have to patiently test each combination of amp models, levels, and effects until you hit the sound you're after. Further to this, it's really only useful to be doing this if you have the FBV foot controller. In fact, if you're after modelling amplifiers because you want to use the squintillion effects banks and don't buy the big foot controller to go with it (it doesn't even come with a basic one!), you're going to have a bad time.

I think the Line 6 amps take a big knock just because people can't be bothered dicking about with the settings to dial in a good sound - which is something I totally understand, to be honest.

Personally, the only things I can really ding the Spider IV over are:

• Doesn't come with a foot controller, and is pretty useless without the top-end one.
• Foot controller connects only via CAT5 network cable, not MIDI, meaning you can only use Line 6's controller (I had a Behringer FCB1010, which was great but used MIDI DIN connectors)
• Changing from one preset to another (even with the same damn amp model!) causes a microsecond of silence as the amp changes. Really annoying when playing on your own or recording a single take, but not so noticeable when the rest of the band is playing too.
• There are only four slots per bank. Admittedly, there are 16 banks for a total of 64 user presets, but four slots is precisely one less than I need at minimum, and I have to make do with some rapid tap-dancing efforts to kick in my lead guitar tone - three or four taps (stomp, modulation, delay, reverb) to turn it on, and the same to turn it off. I could reduce this to two taps (bank up/down, preset x), but that results in the above point being demonstrated. Plus, I'd get confused.

• The FX settings are extremely limiting. There are only three effects "channels", and while it makes sense (albeit annoying) that say, flanger and phaser can't be on at the same time, you can't have compression and pitch shifting at the same time. You can also only have them in a certain order, even if you mess about with the computer-side software. Meaning, you can modulate the compressed signal, but you can't compress the modulated signal.

For a company that bills themselves on amazingly customisable effects, that last point is especially irritating. The third point is also inexcusable, IMO. Even my old (and much cheaper) Behringer V-Ampire modelling amp didn't have silence between preset switching if the presets were on the same amp model.

Ultimately though, I do think Line 6's dodgy reputation for amplifiers is undeserved, although I have only used the top-end Spider IV, so I can't speak for the low-end ones.