Owner's Manual

GETTING SET UP: SCENARIO ONE – IN THE STUDIO
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channel inputs. Make sure the POD A.I.R. switch is set to DIRECT.
You should be all ready to play your guitar and hear it POD-processed, and lay
down a track on your recorder. Then you can play back the track and switch amps,
effects, whatever – welcome to the digital software revolution! And for an even
more revolutionary experience, be sure to check out the MIDI Mania section
below, plus the Deep Editing & MIDI Control chapter to learn how to
automate it all. By the way: don’t monitor the pre-POD and post-POD guitar
signals at the same time, as you’ll get comb filtering that will mess up your sound.
(Scary, huh?)
Level Headed
When setting levels in any of the above scenarios, watch carefully for the CLIP
indicator to light on your POD (it’s just under the Up and Down buttons).
This lets you know you’re clipping the POD input and so you need to turn down
the signal you’re feeding it. You should also be sure you don’t send too little level to
POD. As with any audio device, this will result in poor performance.
Radiation Alert
You’re also likely to find, especially if you are using a guitar with single coil
pickups, that it is quite easy to pick up some serious noise from any computer
monitor you might have in your studio. CRT displays are, after all, just special
purpose ray guns that shoot photons at you all day long. Your guitar pickups
receive and amplify the electro-magnetic fields that your display radiates, and you
hear this in your audio signal as buzz and hum. Moving farther from the CRT, and
turning your guitar so it does not directly face the computer’s display, will
minimize this problem. But if you find yourself in a tight studio setup, needing to
lay down some quick tracks, and being pestered by CRT-induced buzz, you may
find it helpful to do as we have sometimes done: set up your track to record and
start your pre-roll; reach up and flick your computer monitor’s power switch off;
record your guitar part; stop your recording, flick the monitor back on, and check
out the buzz-free playback.
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