Q. Relying on Others' Patches

The Pod HD is only one part of a system that goes from your fingers to your ears. In between those parts of your body there is also a guitar, pickups, cables, speakers, and a listening environment (room). There may additionally be an actual amp and other effects processors. While the Pod HD is common to your gear and anyone else who makes a Pod HD patch, every other factor is probably different, including not only the ears of the person who built it but also his musical tastes.

This means it's highly unlikely for you to download someone else's patch and have it sound the same when you use it as it sounded to the creator. This doesn't mean the patch is unusable, only that it likely needs to be tweaked to fit your needs. I suggest reviewing the guitar setup and amp tone pages to understand where differences may have existed and how you can bridge any gaps.

Top of Tips and Pitfalls

IX. TroubleShooting

• A. Too much noise

• B. Tone is fizzy

• C. Tone is harsh

• D. Tone has digital clipping

• E. Tone is muffled

• F. Distortion is muddy/fuzzy/farty

• G. Distortion is dirty/gritty

• H. Tone is thin

• I. Software Knobs move on their own

• J. I'm Getting DSP Limit Reached Errors

A. Too much noise

This section addresses a constantly-noisy signal, not noisy tone. For a noisy tone, see the next section.

First turn off all the amp models and effects in your signal chain, to see if your bypass signal sounds ok. This will tell you if you have possibly hooked the Pod up incorrectly. If so, see the setup page.

If the bypass is ok, toggle each effect in the chain on then back off, seeing if one makes it sound noisy. Once you've tested them individually, turn them on one at a time and try to determine which one pushes the sound over the edge. Usually this will be the amp model using a lot of distortion or a compressor or distortion effect. You may have an effect before this one that amplifies the signal strongly, causing it to distort/compress much more than you want. Also, sometimes you feed such a unit an unconventional signal (extremely bright or full of deep bass) and it reacts unexpectedly. See if the distortion/compression stages clean up if you turn off an effect or two before that one. Or dial back the distortion/compression. Compressors use "threshold" instead of "drive". Unlike "drive", "threshold" compresses less at higher settings.

You can mildly reduce noise by changing the input settings from their defaults, which pull in numerous inputs, some of which are likely unused. (see "input settings" section) Note: this setting is NOT necessarily global. Just because you changed it once doesn't mean that all your patches have unused inputs disabled.

I have heard reports that the effect loop on the Pod can cause tone suck or additional noise. I haven't experienced that, and I wouldn't know how to get around it other than to make sure you are gain staging everything correctly or simply put your effects in front/behind the pod rather than in its loop.

Finally, you might just have noisy pickups or a noisy cable, or be picking up some kind of ground hum. While this is less noticeable on a clean signal, when you compress/distort it, all that noise will be amplified. Try using a different guitar and cables to determine if they are the problem. You may want to get a hum eliminator.

You can also use the noise gate effects in the Pod. I recommend setting this as the first effect in your chain, and adjusting it so that it is just sensitive enough to get rid of the noise when your guitar is muted. Setting it too sensitive will cause it to kill sustaining notes unnaturally. Setting it even higher will make your tone sound thin (for the "Noise Gate", not "Hard Gate"). See the link for my favored method of dialing it in.

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