I’m lucky enough to own a physical Tweed Deluxe amp. I also think that a Tweed Deluxe amp rig for home use has become so expensive in 2023, it’s difficult to justify. So I’ve started looking at alternatives, to see how they compare to the real thing.
This time around, I’m looking at one of the most hyped products of 2024: IK Multimedia’s ToneX One profile/capture playback pedal, and a stock 5e3 Tweed Deluxe profile/capture that comes free with it.
Not Meant To Be A Review Of The ToneX Ecosystem
This blog post started out as a celebration of just how good (imho) ToneX One is for that classic 5e3 Tweed Deluxe sound. And I was hoping to leave it there.
However, I ran into some problems with both the pedal and desktop software while I was putting this blog post together. I’ve included the ones that I think are relevant for today; there are plenty more that I’ll save for a wider look at ToneX.
What Is ToneX One?
ToneX is a family of signal chain profiler/capture products from IK Multimedia. It’s a budget-friendly rival to the Kemper Profile and the capture features of the Neural DSP Quad Cortex.
ToneX One is a mini pedal that can switch between four captures (or “tone models” in IK Multimedia-speak) at a time. The pedal itself isn’t a profiler or capture device; it’s purely for playing through.
It’s also cheap – far far cheaper than the Kemper or Neural DSP alternatives. For the cost of a mid-priced boutique overdrive pedal, you get access to some of IK Multimedia’s professional captures, and a hardware device that can run any of the community’s free or paid-for captures.
Included in the basic set of captures is IK Multimedia’s “Tweed 1” collection … and in there, I’ve found an excellent 5e3 Tweed Deluxe sound.
What Do I Need To Use It?
One of the great things about the ToneX One is that you don’t need to run it into an amp or a cab. You can run it straight into your audio interface.
It can also act as an audio interface. However, my ToneX One is so noisy when plugged into my computer via USB cable that I can’t use it that way. (I do not have these noise problems when my Kemper or Axe-FX 3 are plugged into the same computer.)
My Rig Today
Today, I’m playing:
- Spot (my Fender American Deluxe Telecaster with Twisted Tele pickups),
- into my Axe-FX 3 (for the tuner)
- out to my pedalboard
- back into the Axe-FX 3 (for noise gate, delay and reverb)
- out to my audio interface
- and into my DAW.
I have the Warm Audio Centavo (a Klon klone) and the ToneX One in separate loops of my Gigrig G2. This ensures that the Centavo’s buffer cannot affect the tone when I’m not using it.
All amp and cab sounds are coming from the ToneX One. I’m not using any amp modelling or any virtual speaker cabs in the Axe-FX 3 at all.
All the delay and reverb that you hear is coming from the Axe-FX 3.
There’s no post-processing applied to the audio demos – but I am applying a 5 dB boost at 5 kHz after the delay and reverbs in the Axe-FX 3. (Hat tip to the wonderfully Mad Henning Pauly for this tip.) Without out, ToneX One sounds a little dull.
I will level-match the audio demos before uploading them.
ToneX One As A 5e3 Tweed Deluxe
On Its Own
I’ve loaded the ‘Pushed Oldie’ tone model into my ToneX One pedal, and then I’ve twiddled with the EQ and gain controls on ToneX One until I had it dialled in like this:
To my ears, that right there is already a great 5e3 Tweed Deluxe sound. It’s got the warmth, the mid-range and the roundness that I chase. It’s also got that characteristic raspiness that I sometimes forget should be part of any 5e3 Tweed Deluxe sound. And it sounds to me like a professionally-recorded amp.
I think it’s a lot better than what I’ve managed to capture (so far!) from my real amp.
(This is an old demo from last year, from before I started level-matching my demos. It’s going to be louder than today’s recordings!)
Expect a future blog post from me, where I try to get my recordings of my real amp sounding a lot closer to how the ToneX One sounds.
I think this ToneX ‘Pushed Oldie’ sounds even better when pushed with a Klon-style pedal.
With The Warm Audio Centavo
I’ve set the Warm Audio Centavo up as a clean boost to push the ‘Pushed Oldie’ tone model in the ToneX One. Here’s how they sound together:
I love what the Centavo has done to the mid-range here. To my ears, it’s a little more saturated (which is closer to my real amp’s sound) and it sounds a little more ‘in your face’ than before.
I think it would sound even better with the gain on the ToneX One backed off a bit … but I’ll come to that shortly.
Cleans Up Well Too
One of the things that’s both magical and challenging about the 5e3 Tweed Deluxe is that you have to ride your guitar’s volume control to get the best out of it. Want a clean tone? Switch pickups and turn down your volume knob a bit.
That’s exactly what I’ve done here. I’m now on Spot’s neck pickup, and the volume control is somewhere between a quarter and a third of the way down.
I’m still boosting the ToneX One with the Centavo, and I have’t touched any of the controls on either Centavo or the ToneX One.
Still quite gritty for sure, but still very usable. It’s the kind of “clean tone” that professional guitarists demonstrate on YouTube.
One Of The Best Clean Tones I’ve Ever Had
After a bit more fiddling with the EQ and gain controls – and switching to the middle position on Spot’s pickup selector – I found this tone:
It’s warm without being muddy, and it’s snappy without being dull. That’s one of the best clean tones I’ve ever had.
EQ And Gain Changes Suit This 5e3 Tone Model
I’ve had a very good experience with how the sound changes when I tweak the EQ and gain controls on the ToneX One. It’s an aspect of ToneX that deserves to be praised.
One of my (many) frustrations with the Kemper has been how its profiles quickly fall apart when I tweak EQ or gain on the unit. I’ve found the profiles to be quite fragile, and the EQ bands on the unit have never seemed musical in the way many amp EQ controls are.
(Kemper has addressed this by adding support for emulating the tone stacks of popular amps. As the 5e3 circuit doesn’t really have a tone stack, this isn’t available as an emulation on the Kemper – understandably so.)
On the ToneX One, I’ve been tweaking the EQ and gain controls without any such worries. In fact, I’ve not had to give them a single thought. I’ve just taken them for granted, and they haven’t disappointed once.
I’ve no idea if I’d have the same experience using a different tone model. As I’ll cover in a moment, I’m currently running just the one tone model on my ToneX One. But I’d be amazed if the 5e3 tone model is the only one where this works well. It is a very unusual amp, after all.
What About Other Tweed Amps?
5F6 Fender Bassman Is Locked Behind A Paywall
(I believe that) when most people think of tweed tone, it’s the sound of a 5F6 Bassman, not the 5e3 Tweed Deluxe. So it was the obvious thing to try for this blog post.
Unfortunately, the included ‘Tweed 1’ pack doesn’t include any 5F6 Bassman tone models at all. To get those, I have to buy the ‘ToneX MAX’ software edition, which unlocks the ‘Tweed 2’ pack. (I guess IK Multimedia also feel that the Bassman is the tone that people are actually after …?)
I couldn’t tell you how much that costs: when I click the ‘Buy’ button inside the ToneX desktop software, it just takes me to IK Multimedia’s home page 🤦♂️
While I could dig through website and find the upgrade price (if you do this, remember to login first to see the upgrade price), I’ve got a good reason for not doing so. Several hundred good reasons, as it turns out …
Free Trials Are Available … But No Way To Use The Trial
The ToneX desktop software has a very tempting ‘Trial’ button beneath each commercial tone model collection. It offers 30 mins of free trial. That seems fair to me.
Wonderful: I’m far more likely to buy software if I’ve been able to try it out first. Well, it would be wonderful if it actually worked. It doesn’t. The free trial feature is (still!) utterly useless in practice.
There’s no way to load trial tone models onto the ToneX One pedal.
That’s a real shame. I think that the Tweed Deluxe tone model is fantastic. I suspect that IK Multimedia’s Tweed Bassman tone model is equally as good.
However, I’m not going to splash the cash to find out without being able to trial it first. ToneX captures are very very hit and miss. Far more miss than hit, in my experience …
Community Captures Not For The Win
With the IK Multimedia Tweed 2 pack behind a paywall (and no working free trial available), I turned to ToneNET (where the ToneX community have uploaded their own captures) to see if I could find a 5F6 Bassman to showcase today.
There’s a couple of hundred captures that reference the Bassman. Looks promising!
I spent a morning auditioning as many of the 5F6 Bassman captures as I could, but I didn’t find any community captures that came close to the quality of IK Multimedia’s Tweed Deluxe capture.
How can I put this? They showcase just how wide and varied people’s idea of guitar tone can be. Some of the captures I auditioned have hundreds of downloads and hundreds of likes. There are clearly folks out there who like the tones that these community captures are offering.
I’m just not one of them. None of them (in my opinion) sounded anything like a real mic’d-up 5F6 Bassman should.
(In defence of the community, I’ve tried making ToneX captures myself. It’s a topic that will get its own blog post soon. The tl;dr of it is that I haven’t yet managed to make accurate ToneX captures of my own rig.)
All of this is why a working ‘Trial’ feature for ToneX One is very important to me.
I don’t want to waste money on multiple commercial capture packs while looking for one that delivers the tone I’m looking for. And it is a waste of money.
With a physical pedal, if I don’t like it, I can return it to the shop I bought it from within 14 days. If it’s a second-hand pedal, I can sell it on to someone else (who may well love it), and get most (sometimes all) of my money back.
I can’t do that with ToneX’s commercial capture packs. If I buy a ToneX collection and I don’t like it, there’s no way to get a refund, and there’s no way to sell the license on to someone else instead. The money is simply wasted.
ToneX One Pedal Issues That I Ran Into Today
If you’re thinking of getting a ToneX One as a way to get great 5e3 tones, I think you need to also know about the areas where ToneX still has a lot of maturing to do.
Earlier on, I mentioned the noise problems when the pedal’s plugged into my laptop via a USB cable. Here’s some other issues that I ran into today while making this blog post.
No Idea What My Settings Are
At the top of the post, I said that “I’ve twiddled with the EQ and gain controls”, without providing any details. That’s because there’s no way (that I’ve found!) to see what I’ve dialled in.
ToneX One has no display of any kind, and IK Multimedia’s desktop software can only load models onto the pedal; it doesn’t show me any of the settings that I’ve dialled in on the pedal.
There are marked knobs on the pedal itself. However, I’ve been trying to dial in a second capture for this blog post (the Fender Bassman mentioned above), and that meant moving the knobs from where I’d dialled in the Tweed Deluxe.
At this price, I’m okay with the pedal not being able to show what settings it has recalled. It would be incredibly helpful if the desktop software could do so, though.
Workarounds Available Today For The Lack Of Settings Info
If it’s important that you know what the settings are (for example, using ToneX to track an album you’re recording at home over several months), there’s a few ways to deal with this:
- only load one capture onto ToneX One, and treat it as an analogue pedal;
- look at the larger ToneX pedal, which does have a screen that can show settings; or
- run ToneX as a plugin in your DAW instead (no pedal required at all).
Option 3 isn’t for me. Rightly or wrongly, I’m a great believer that the signal chain order plays an important role in the final sound that I get. With my rig, that means my amp and cab (whether real or virtual) comes before my audio interface. I think Option 3 works best if you’re going to plug your guitar directly into your audio interface.
I could go for Option 2 in the future. I’d love to use captures for recording music, to give me tones that remain exactly the same if I recall them months later. That depends on me making some accurate ToneX captures first. As I mentioned above, I’m finding that very difficult to do so far.
For now, I’m just going to treat ToneX One like I would an analogue pedal, and use it only for this Tweed Deluxe capture. I love the tone I’m getting, and I’ll be able to look at the EQ controls and see exactly how it’s dialled in. (The gain, not so much, as it’s an ALT function on the volume control.)
Handily, there is a ‘stomp’ mode available to help with that.
‘Stomp’ Mode Is How I’m Going To Use ToneX One For Now
By default, the pedal runs in ‘preset’ mode: stepping on the foot switch changes from one preset to the other and back again, with no way to bypass the pedal. This is how I’ve been using my ToneX One since I bought it.
The pedal can also run in ‘stomp’ mode, where stepping on the foot switch bypasses the pedal. In this mode, the pedal runs a single preset. I’m going to switch to this mode going forward.
‘Stomp’ mode has its own assignment inside the pedal. It was easy enough to copy the Tweed Deluxe tone model over from ‘preset’ mode to the ‘stomp’ mode – just a simple drag and drop.
After switching to ‘stomp’ mode, I did run into a problem with the ALT mode appearing not to work (or rather, I couldn’t tell which mode I was in as the ALT LED on the pedal stopped changing colour).
I’m not sure if that was a real bug, or just me using the ALT button wrongly. Speaking of which …
I Definitely Turned On The Noise Gate Without Meaning To
On the first three audio demos today, did you notice how the audio cut out rather strangely at the end?
That’s the noise gate on the ToneX One kicking in. Sounds like a true gate to me (sound is either on or off), rather than a more modern downward expander (downward expanders kill the sound by fading out the volume). Probably great for high gain. I’m not a fan of that for low gain rhythm tones.
Anyway … the real point that I want to make is that it wasn’t supposed to be on at all. I switched it on by accident at some point earlier in the day while auditioning all those 5F6 Bassman community captures.
I was tweaking the controls all the time, trying to get a 5F6 tone that I was happy to share with you on here. At some point, I must have been in the pedal’s ALT mode, where the pedal’s EQ controls instead control the noise gate, compressor and reverb.
With no display to tell you what you’ve done (and no way to see the settings in the desktop software), it’s a mistake that’s easy not to notice. Perhaps one to chalk up to a learning curve as much as anything.
Problem is, if you’re going to use a ToneX One with multiple guitars, you are going to end up switching into one of the pedal’s other modes quite a lot. And that increases the likelihood of making mistakes like this.
The Input Trim Control Is The Most Important Control On The Pedal
ToneX One has a global control called the Input Trim. In my experience, it plays a huge role in how the ToneX One sounds.
It doesn’t seem to be a straight-forward input volume control. When I turn the Input Trim up or down, it doesn’t react like I’m adding or removing a neutral boost in front of the pedal. It’s doing something else.
And a quick Internet search shows that plenty of folks find it troublesome to work with.
I end up dialling it in by ear for each guitar. Got no choice when you can’t see what the settings are. It is a bit of a faff. That’s why I’ve only used the one guitar for today’s demo, and haven’t recorded this rig with my Les Paul.
(I suspect it actually needs dialling in for each guitar & preset pairing. Input Trim is currently a global setting though, so that’s currently not possible.)
I’ve never had to tweak a setting like this for pro-level units like my Kemper, FM-3 or Axe-FX 3. (As far as I know, it’s not a thing on Line6 Helix either.) I’m most familiar with the Fractal Audio gear, where it just works.
For home hobbyists, I don’t think it’s a big deal – as long as you’re aware of it. We’re not under the time pressures of a life performance. If we want to switch guitars, we can take as long as we want.
If you’re even semi-serious about getting reproducible sounds, then (at the very least) the larger ToneX pedal might be the better choice, because at least you can see what Input Trim you’ve dialled in.
And if you’re someone who wants to be able to just pick up your guitar and play with minimal effort involved, then this might be a reason to look elsewhere for your 5e3 tones, perhaps by buying the real amp instead.
How Do The Prices Compare?
At the time of writing, the ToneX One pedal is in UK stores for £159.
Fender are currently asking £2,549 (which is £100 more than last year) for the 57 Custom Deluxe amplifier. It needs pairing with an attenuator for home use (and for home recording). My current choice is the Fryette Power Station PS-100, which is available for £1,199.
That’s a total of £3,748 if you want the real thing (and to be able to enjoy it at home) – an increase of £187 in the last 12 months.
To put it another way, the ToneX One pedal currently costs less than this year’s price increase of the real rig. That’s a heck of a good deal.
Which Do You Prefer?
For recorded tones, I prefer how the ToneX One sounds.
I’m getting far better recorded 5e3 tones out of the ToneX One pedal. I think the ToneX One pedal is giving me some of the best 5e3 tones that I’ve had to date. And that clean tone 😍 … it’s the kind of sound that other Tweed Deluxe owners say is in the real amp, but I’ve never managed to find in mine to date.
(I’ve heard similar clean tones out of the excellent Cornell Romany 12. Maybe it’s time I got one …)
For me, that clean tone alone is worth what I paid for my ToneX One pedal. Throw in the lovely crunchy rhythm tone above, and I honestly feel like I’m getting two pedals for the price of one. And that’s just from the single ToneX tone model. There are many more tone models included with ToneX One.
I’m not even sure if I can get the same recorded tones out of my real amp. As you’ve already heard, I haven’t managed it so far! Now that I’ve got a new reference to compare against, maybe I’ll do better the next time I try? It’s very much a lack-of-skill problem on my part.
But maybe it just isn’t possible to get those kind of 5e3 tones out of a home setup where the amp has to be attenuated?
The one thing that the real amp still has going for it is the experience of discovering tones. Those interactive volume controls … so far, I haven’t found anything quite like it amongst the alternatives that I’ve tried.
Oh, and I am rather fond of how saturated my amp gets. Regular readers will be aware I strongly suspect that my amp is a bit of an outlier there, that it has far more gain than other 5e3 reproductions will have.
(Reminds me … that’s something else that I need to explore in its own blog post soon! I’d forgotten about that, and I suspect my local amp tech has too …)
Final Thoughts
Can you get a better 5e3 Tweed Deluxe tone for the same price (or less)? I’m not sure that you can. I think the ToneX One delivers one of the most polished recorded 5e3 tones around at any price.
Can you get a great Tweed Deluxe tone with less frustration bundled in? Oh definitely. The Universal Audio UAFX Woodrow costs more (around the same price as the larger ToneX pedal), but (imho) is less frustrating to use.
It’s such a shame that both the hardware design and the desktop software have so much maturing still to do. It really takes the edge off my enjoyment of what the ToneX One can do.
I think it’s cheap enough to live with the frustrations, especially because of how good it sounds.
But they’re also the reason why I’m almost certainly not going to use the ToneX One for what I originally wanted it for: to play captures of my own rig. I’m either going to pick up one of the larger ToneX pedals (for the display) or (if I can’t get the capture process working for me) I’m going to buy a Nano Cortex next year instead.