X. Doom

The Doom basically sounds like a heavily customized Marshall; and as you might guess from the name, it is dialed in towards doom, sludge, and black metal tones. It's kind of vintage and droning, but at the same time it stays focused and doesn't get a little weird like a Marshall would if pushed that hard. Personally, I don't really mess around with these tones, so I can't speak a lot on how to dial it in.

One thing that has been mentioned about this amp model is that it takes Distortion pedals very well. You can set the amp to provide a mild breakup, then drive it hard with a heavily distorted pedal. Or you can use a pedal with a slight breakup and drive the amp hard. Either way you get a usable tone without much tweaking. And this works across a wide variety of the distortion effects available on the Pod. So this will be my focus for the amp. I'm hoping it might deliver a better tone for some of the patches where I use a heavy pedal distortion into a slightly broken up Marshall, like my Satriani and Opeth tones.

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XI. Epic

This amp requires heavy tweaking to get it in the "usable" range for me. But once there, it provides a tone no other model delivers. I would describe it as dry, thrashy, tight, and not-too-saturated. I think it should sound good for thrashy death metal tones like Opeth, Extol, or The Faceless.

If you try to get pre-amp distortion from this model, bring your broom. It's a mess. Rather than try to use EQ or boost pedal trickery to clean it up, let me save you some time. Don't bother. It sounds like a broken amp. Set Drive to 5% and forget about it. All the distortion is going to come from the power section. Crank the Master DEP to 100%.

I find a distortion pedal is necessary to focus the tone. Also, the amp's EQ plays heavily into the distortion tone you get from its power section. This is a bit tricky. While I like to boost mids in my pre-eq or distortion pedal, I find turning up mids (or even using 50% mids) can consume the tone, causing it to sound too dark and compressed, like a pedal distortion. I like to back off of it, even going down to like 15% to get more of a natural bite out of the tone. On the other hand, I boost Treble, and keep Presence slightly under 50%. Of course, these relationships change depending on how you pre-eq the amp. Be warned.

As for DEP's, again Master at 100% - it's the source of the distortion. I suppose you could turn this down if you wanted to use a pedal for your distortion, but this amp has so many pitfalls, I'd be scared to try to dial that in. Sag can be set to taste, but I find the amp is still tight and percussive at 50% and sounds more natural than if you set it any lower. Hum I actually turn down a little. With Master cranked, the amp can easily get into "broken power amp" tones, swirling and such. Turning down Hum a little helps prevent this, along with smart EQ settings and amounts of gain. Bias I turn down a little - this makes the tone have a bit more bite, but going too low makes it sound thin and scooped. Bias X I turn down all the way. I don't like what turning this up at all does to the tone - seems to make it sound flat and overly compressed.

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