Behringer Autocom

Posted on Wednesday, April 14, 2010 in Electronics

Behringer Autocom

good noise get for marshall amp?

i have a boss NS-2, but it takes out heaps of color in the tone.

i tried using a behringer autocom pro-xl MDX1600. it works well with keeping the tone and the color, but the gate itself isnt so good. its a two channel processor, so i use one for my guitar (guitar -> effects -> behringer -> amp) and one for the amp. (preamp out -> behringer -> preamp in)

the amp i use is a jvm 210h

when i dial in the gate for the amp, it cuts out the amp buzz for about half the gain, but if the gain is pushed past halfway on the amp, the buzz comes in really loud. if i increase the gate any further, i cant play any picked out notes, only chords come through.

what is the best gate for this situation? one that can get rid of the buzz but hardly touch the color of the signal. im interested in all price rangers.

There are two separate situations here, but the important one to look at is that you have a lot of buzz/noise in your signal. You need to reduce it. The noise gate is completely secondary to that.

You're going to want to do a number of things, including making sure your guitar is properly grounded/shielded, make sure you aren't injecting noise from nearby fluorescent lights, computers etc, and pinpoint exactly where that noise is coming from. It's important to understand that with gain comes noise - this is unavoidable. Less gain = less noise. It is far better to have a large clean signal hit one source of distortion then a signal to go through two different distortion devices.

I have high output pickups in my guitars (one has actives, the other has a high output Seymour Duncan in the bridge), so I hit my distortion devices with a nice strong fatty signal. I rarely have to turn the gain up above 4 or 5 when I'm using a distortion pedal (ie Boss Metal Zone, Metalcore, etc).

So where I'm going with this is to get your distortion from your preamp or your distortion from your amp, but not both. Likewise for the noise gate - try it in one place or the other, but not both until you figure out how to make one of them sound good.

I helped my buddy tweak his rig, and we ended up putting the noise gate after his effects, while getting the distortion from his amp. Works wonderfully, and he uses (you guessed it) a Boss NS-2. We don't need a second one, just having the one works just fine.

What we did is set his threshold high and release as fast as possible... on the NS-2, I believe that corresponds to both knobs turned all the way inwards. He plays a lot of hard rock, especially chunky power chords, so doing this helps emphasize the "chunk" factor.

It's important to note that he has active pickups (no noise/hum/buzz), a relatively clean effects path (chorus/echo, wah, delay/reverb iirc), and his amp doesn't have any real noise... he does crank the gain up fairly high (above 6), too, and is able to get away with it because of that reason.

High output pickups -> distortion = fuller distortion, and high output pickups -> noise gate = more room to work with the threshold, ie, a higher dynamic range (difference between loudest and quietest notes).... but that only applies when you work on keeping that noise down!

Good luck. I put the best link I've ever found in re: to grounding/shielding your guitar below.

Saul