[Harp-L] Gigged straight to the PA with a Line 6 HD500

[Dan Hazen <bluesmandan76@xxxxxxxxx>]

Yesterday our band played for the Elvis Fest in Tupelo. I had to carry
extra gear for the drummer, plus mixing/sound gear, so I didn't have enough
room in the car for my amp, too. So I decided to try taking my Line 6
HD500, and go straight to the board. I've had it for a couple of years (for
guitar), and I had messed around with it at home for harmonica, and had a
nice sound set up on it, but had never gigged with it.

I had it set up with a noise gate, running stereo to a pair of Bass Ampeg
sims (gain at 37%), with two different cabinet sims (one dark, one bright),
a hint of triplet timed slapback, and the expression pedal as a 12 dB
volume boost for solos. The noise gate took care of feedback issues. The
dual Ampegs made the sound thick like I want. The volume pedal made solos
really stand out.

I'm pretty die hard for my tube amps, but I have to say... the HD500
outperformed them. No feedback, controllable presence and volume, great
tone, lightweight. I was impressed.

I was especially impressed with the volume boost. It's different than
turning up the volume knob on the microphone, because that's just pre-gain
volume, so you hit your gain tubes with more juice and get more compression
and distortion, and not necessarily much more volume... it's certainly not
the "same tone but louder" when you do that, unless you have your tube amp
set up really clean with lots of headroom (and I like a bit of dirt). When
you goose the mic's volume and send a hotter signal to an already dirty
amp, you get more dirt, but not much more volume. Your tone changes in an
undesirable way to get that louder sound. But with the HD500 I was
controlling output volume, not input volume (like putting a volume pedal in
the fx loop of an amplifier), so my tone remained intact, but got louder
when I wanted it to. It was great.

I still want my tube amps for smaller gigs where I don't need to go out to
the PA, but for any situation where I would want to mic the amp... I think
the HD500 will be superior. I'm gonna skip the middle man and go straight
to the board.