I know this horse has been beaten to death a thousand times over, but I'd still like to revisit the clean sense setting because I've just found out I've had it set wrong for my main guitar and that made a lot of difference. Until tonight it was set to 5.0 (my main guitar is an Ibanez RG1570 with a DiMarzio Fred on the bridge and a 36th Anniversary PAF on the neck). Didn't sound bad but could get a little brittle at times and the dynamics were good, or so I thought.
Then tonight I've decided to try lowering clean sense to 3.5 and WHOA! All of a sudden dynamics improved and notes seemed to get more articulate. Please note that this wasn't with clean tones, the manual says the clean sense control doesn't affect distorted tones but I beg to differ. Or maybe I'm hearing things (it has happened before), hence this thread - please take a moment to try this out and tell me if I'm crazy.
So my old approach for setting clean sense was strumming hard and turning the knob until the input LED barely lit RED. The new approach is setting clean sense so that the input LED barely lights YELLOW. It seems to make a world of difference to me.
Now on to the second and complimentary setting: the noise gate. Some may prefer the expander pedals (2:1 and 4:1), I like the noise gate accessible from the "Noise Gate" knob because it seems to be based on a low pass expander, which I prefer because it helps control the "bite" on note attacks. Now the problem is, if you set it too high (like almost all of the factory rigs and rigs in the rig packs) it will muffle your tone too much and make it sound dull. So what you want is to set it at the very threshold where when muting the strings no hum can be heard (maybe just a little). The important thing to notice here is that this threshold depends on how much gain is dialed in the patch (also the type of pickup of course), which means the input section must be unlocked so gate settings can be stored with each rig.
Peace,
Deny