Line 6 Spider V

menamestom

Plectrum said:

Jetfire said:

Im interested to hear what this sounds like in he flesh .. if theyve dropped the "CRAZY" metal settings or whatever it was and are heading straight into the Fender Mustang amp range, this could be very interesting... 

From what I hear it's that awful, crazy metal sound which sells it. Bad as it is, teenage boys love it and they're the target audience really.

Have you listened to the website demo, there's about 10 different styles on there, some of the cleaner ones sound quite nice.  All modelling amps have these nasty sounds, doesn't mean they don't have some alright ones.  To be fair most AXE FX demos have the same nasty sounds to my ears.

rossyamaha

OK so for once, I won't do the big sell. There will be plenty of stuff coming and you can make your own minds up. 

It has been said already but the target market for Spider has traditionally been teenager that hates everything and plugs his/ her BC Rich into the insane model and makes a noise that sounds like a small dog choking on a hot curry. 5 is quite a bit different. 

The models for one are actual models. Theres also loads of them. There are loads of FX too. And backing stuff to jam along to. And the wireless from the 60 up. And a built in looper. A cool thing you can do with the wireless connectivity which may or may not get mentioned is set the inbuilt receiver to auto so if there is more than one Spider on stage, they won't get confused. OR! You can set the channel manually. This actually means you can plug in your transmitter and send your guitar to 2, 3, 4, actually an infinite number of amps simultaneously. I'm sorry but thats cool as fuck! Oh and no one else can do that. Right I'll stop there. 

Does it sound any good? I think so. Certainly better toanz thatn I've had out of the V4. Insane is still in there for you crazy kids that don't wash and pull legs of, well erm spiders! 

Just to qualify this product. It's not a Dumble. It's not a Boogie, or Fender or anything else considered tasty. It's a Spider. Much better than the last one. MUCH BETTER! This is a great practice amp, backup amp, main amp if you can't afford toobs and pedals and such. Spider gets a bad rap but forget everything that you think they are. This is different. In fact it's much more like a Flextone than a Spider. 

I have the 60. I haven't played through it yet. I will. Gimme some tone requests and I'll try and get some stuff uploaded this weekend. 

paul_c2

If I were in the market for a new (modelling) amp, and hadn't just bought one, I would have previously dismissed the Line 6 Spider IV based on negative reviews but definitely given the Spider V a try. I know there's a danger they're all rubbish, but with 200 models/simulations to choose from, there's bound to be one or two decent ones in there?

rossyamaha

paul_c2 said:

If I were in the market for a new (modelling) amp, and hadn't just bought one, I would have previously dismissed the Line 6 Spider IV based on negative reviews but definitely given the Spider V a try. I know there's a danger they're all rubbish, but with 200 models/simulations to choose from, there's bound to be one or two decent ones in there?

One or two. ;-) 

paul_c2

Are you saying there's one decent sound, or two decent sounds?

rossyamaha

paul_c2 said:

Are you saying there's one decent sound, or two decent sounds?

It was Paul Hindmarsh doing all the playing today so everything sounded great. I hate him. 

ICBM

Is it wrong that I'm actually much more interested in this than yet another handbuilt Fender-that-they-never-quite-made-in-the-50s-and-60s valve amp?



Question for @rossyamaha: it's got a separate powered tweeter - for the acoustic sounds, obviously - is it turned off for the electric sounds, or does the modelled output compensate for the FRFR speaker system? I'm guessing the former or there would be no need for it to be separately powered… or is it that it's just better and more efficient to bi-amp it? Or maybe control the amount of power going to the tweeter in the software? Just my usual curiosity about combined acoustic/electric sounds again .

rossyamaha

@ICBM I'm actually not sure. I was at the back of the room so couldn't tell. Will find out. I'm in GG Glasgow on Monday so might be able to pop it round for you. 

ICBM

rossyamaha said:

@ICBM I'm actually not sure. I was at the back of the room so couldn't tell. Will find out. I'm in GG Glasgow on Monday so might be able to pop it round for you. 

Damn… won't be in then. Thursday only usually.




Unless you want to "lose" it in some sort of unmarked box which I can conveniently "find" for you and return later .

bingefeller

rossyamaha said:

OK so for once, I won't do the big sell. There will be plenty of stuff coming and you can make your own minds up. 

It has been said already but the target market for Spider has traditionally been teenager that hates everything and plugs his/ her BC Rich into the insane model and makes a noise that sounds like a small dog choking on a hot curry. 5 is quite a bit different. 

The models for one are actual models. Theres also loads of them. There are loads of FX too. And backing stuff to jam along to. And the wireless from the 60 up. And a built in looper. A cool thing you can do with the wireless connectivity which may or may not get mentioned is set the inbuilt receiver to auto so if there is more than one Spider on stage, they won't get confused. OR! You can set the channel manually. This actually means you can plug in your transmitter and send your guitar to 2, 3, 4, actually an infinite number of amps simultaneously. I'm sorry but thats cool as fuck! Oh and no one else can do that. Right I'll stop there. 

Does it sound any good? I think so. Certainly better toanz thatn I've had out of the V4. Insane is still in there for you crazy kids that don't wash and pull legs of, well erm spiders! 

Just to qualify this product. It's not a Dumble. It's not a Boogie, or Fender or anything else considered tasty. It's a Spider. Much better than the last one. MUCH BETTER! This is a great practice amp, backup amp, main amp if you can't afford toobs and pedals and such. Spider gets a bad rap but forget everything that you think they are. This is different. In fact it's much more like a Flextone than a Spider. 

I have the 60. I haven't played through it yet. I will. Gimme some tone requests and I'll try and get some stuff uploaded this weekend. 

I have some requests:

Clean 80s / 90s AOR LA Studio tones - compression, reverb, delay, chorus etc.
Modern jazz tone - warm sound with very light overdrive, and some delay.  Like Kurt Rosenwinkel, Kreisberg.
Nuno Bettencourt's Fender Vibroverb tone from Waiting For The Punchline.

Drew_TNBD

adam jonez toanz.

ICBM

bingefeller said:

I have some requests:

Clean 80s / 90s AOR LA Studio tones - compression, reverb, delay, chorus etc.
Modern jazz tone - warm sound with very light overdrive, and some delay.  Like Kurt Rosenwinkel, Kreisberg.
Nuno Bettencourt's Fender Vibroverb tone from Waiting For The Punchline.

I'll add…

George Harrison's tone on Revolution
Mike Oldfield's tone on Tubular Bells II
Kurt Cobain's tone on MTV Unplugged In New York

Since none of these can be done with a conventional guitar and amp.

gubble

I'll be buying one for sure.

99% of my playing at home is done through a spider IV 15. For volume and other practical reasons I can't use my Fender valve amp and pedalboard at home much at all - I gig those a lot but when they're at home they're in the flight cases unless I need to do something specific or have the house to myself.

Having tried a number of smaller much more expensive amps I found the spider to be exactly what I needed for home use. It's got some decent sounds on it (even on insane mode) and some useful FX. It's small and can go from nice and quiet to just about cope with a rehearsal volume (I've done this and it held its ground).

If the little Spider V is better and offers more choice - i'll be very happy and will happily give line 6 my money.

impmann

I think @rossyamaha has hit the nail on the head, you need to consider *why* this amp exists and who its aimed at... and like @ICBM I'm far more interested in hearing what this can do than yet another rehash of a Fender or Marshall "booteek" thing that costs the same as a small flat in Barnsley. That is becoming incredibly boring, tbh...

Ross... something for me, matey... one of the HUGE criticisms (mine included) of the Spider IV was that the semi-driven tones (think low gain Marshall-ish stuff) just did not clean up nicely when the volume was turned down. It just sounded farty, or flat. So can you dial in a Malcolm Young crunchy rythmn sound, then back it off and still retain a usable clean(ish) sound?

Also a good, characterful clean tone - WITH DYNAMICS, not compressed to fuck. The old Spiders always sounded like the compressor was stuck on even with it turned off. That's going to be hard to show, chap... but hey, I'll make you work for a living! ;-)

Finally... cabinet honk. The Spider IV suffered dreadfully from a honk (as you'll remember, I don't retain numbers but I remember Mark & I spending a long time with a parametric trying to dial it out... we found it, but I can't remember the frequency range) - its around the mids and can be aggravated by playing a decending open E shape chord from the 12th fret (no barre) down to the the 10th and then to the 8th... the old cabs used to sound awful on a clean setting...

To touch on a point raised earlier - at one point, the Spider was the biggest selling amplifier in the world. Fender etc would have killed for the sales figures. In fact, that's why the Mustang came along... and they made a loss on each one sold to try to retake the market in the early days of the amp. That's how much this market sector means to *any* amp maker...

I wish Line6 every success in the world with the SpiderV - although I can't help thinking that if they'd launched this five/six years ago, instead of blundering down some of the other paths they strayed down and listened to all of us that banged this drum and pleaded with the management to release an updated Spider, I'd still be working there and there would not have been the downturn of fortunes that the company endured...

EricTheWeary

Just watching the Guitar Centre demo. Seems to do a lot of stuff. Nice delays, loving the wireless feature ( although another£140 for a G10). I wondered why it was mic'd up - if you can't get a decent direct emulated out from a digital combo that's a worry...

Fretwired

EricTheWeary said:

Just watching the Guitar Centre demo. Seems to do a lot of stuff. Nice delays, loving the wireless feature ( although another£140 for a G10). I wondered why it was mic'd up - if you can't get a decent direct emulated out from a digital combo that's a worry...

I'd always want to know what an amp sounds like through the speaker rather than direct into a mixer or PC.

impmann

Fretwired said:

EricTheWeary said:

Just watching the Guitar Centre demo. Seems to do a lot of stuff. Nice delays, loving the wireless feature ( although another£140 for a G10). I wondered why it was mic'd up - if you can't get a decent direct emulated out from a digital combo that's a worry...

I'd always want to know what an amp sounds like through the speaker rather than direct into a mixer or PC.

This

gubble

Just heard the quick andertons demo and it sounds very good.

I predict it will be much better than the marshall code

Drew_TNBD

Fretwired said:

EricTheWeary said:

Just watching the Guitar Centre demo. Seems to do a lot of stuff. Nice delays, loving the wireless feature ( although another£140 for a G10). I wondered why it was mic'd up - if you can't get a decent direct emulated out from a digital combo that's a worry...

I'd always want to know what an amp sounds like through the speaker rather than direct into a mixer or PC.

But you're not getting that when they mic it up. You're getting what an amp sounds like through a speaker + microphone + preamp combination. So it's even less of an authentic demonstration of what the product sounds like imho.

ICBM

Drew_TNBD said:

Fretwired said:

I'd always want to know what an amp sounds like through the speaker rather than direct into a mixer or PC. 

But you're not getting that when they mic it up. You're getting what an amp sounds like through a speaker + microphone + preamp combination. So it's even less of an authentic demonstration of what the product sounds like imho.

I'd want to hear both, but if anything the direct output might be more important, since it's the harder to get right.

Not just for recording - a line out is getting more useful for stage use these days, with levels being kept down so far… both from a consistency point of view and for avoiding spill into the mic, when its source isn't louder than anything else around it. It's especially worthwhile if it's pre-master so the level to the desk remains fixed even if you adjust your stage volume.

So it's slightly disappointing that you have to go up as far as the 120W model to get it, but to be honest that's probably the 'pro' level one anyway, with a 12" speaker.