Line 6 POD X3 Family - Manual (Page 40)

Reference: Tweaking Tones
3•8
Gate
The Gate effect helps eliminate unwanted noise when you’re not playing, and can be especially valuable when
using high gain sounds. Like a security gate, it’s supposed to quickly open to pass the things that you want, and
then swing closed to keep out the things that you don’t want.
Thresh – determines how loud your playing has to be to open the gate. More negative numbers (where
the knob is near its fully-counterclockwise setting) mean that the gate will open and allow sound through
even when you are playing quietly, and less negative numbers (where the knob is near its fully-clockwise
setting) mean that the gate will only allow sound to pass when you are playing pretty hard. Turn the
Thresh all the way down to minimum to disable the Gate (Thresh’s value will then be “Off”).
Decay – determines how fast the gate will swing closed. Like a gate in the real world, a fast decay means
the gate might catch your trailing foot as you pass through – in this case, that means the gate will chop
off the decay of your notes. And a slow decay means that as the gate swings slowly closed behind you,
someone might have time to slip through – in this case, that would be the unwanted noise that you hear
as your notes decay. You’ll have to experiment with the Decay to get just the right happy medium for your
particular guitar, playing style, and sound settings.
Compressor
COMPRESSOR 1
TYPE BYP VOL
75% 75% 75%
TYPE
THRESH
-20dB 3dB
GAIN
The Compressor effect is just the thing when you want to smooth out your levels the way that you would
typically do in a recording studio.
Thresh – determines how aggressive you want the Compressor to be in smoothing things out. More
negative numbers make the Compressor more active in taming your levels, so -32dB is a more aggressive
setting than -16dB, say. Some makeup gain is also added as you turn the knob to the left, making for a
much easier tweaking experience.
Gain – controls (what else?) gain, so that even when you’re really squashing your signal with an aggressive
threshold setting, you’ll be able to get good volume levels out of your POD X3, POD X3 Live or POD X3
Pro.