Aethyr Posted December 29, 2011 Share Posted December 29, 2011 Hey all! As promised in my previous thread, where I asked for help regarding the Ultra III, here is my experience after living with the guitar in a Linux environment. First of all, I'll do a small intro on the guitar itself. I bought a Midnight Ebony version and I'm completely in love with it. The guitar looks just beautiful. I know some people complain about the finishing, bindings, etc., but I the only details I didn't like were so minor they're not worth mentioning. The neck is literally the most comfortable neck I've played to this day, utterly mind blowing. Another pleasant surprise was the pickups. I didn't expect such amazing quality. I hope Epiphone releases the ProBuckers separate from their guitars at some point, because I'd seriously recommend those pickups as an affordable alternative to more expensive pickups. On clean settings they completely blow away the SD's I was used to, and even on High Gain the difference is almost inaudible on the same settings. In general, they are warmer and more responsive, and give a richer, fatter tone with more distinct harmonics - and so much more versatile. Perhaps the Trembucker was a bit hotter and more powerful, but it's a trade that, to my ears, is tipped towards what I want. I didn't expect this guitar to completely replace my Studio Gothic even for metal playing, but here I am, not even missing it. Just another amazing guitar by Epiphone. This is all just my opinion of course, but I felt like sharing. :) Now to the best part: living under Linux. The guitar comes with a free copy of Guitar Rig 4 - which I have yet to download. In all honesty; it's useless to me. The guitar is immediately recognized in Linux provided you use ALSA, no sweat. Of course, using Jackd is mandatory for this task, but Jackd is a fairly simple, and very very powerful interface. Routing the system input (specified to the guitar) to rakarrak, and then rakarrak to my output, and voila! It was just that simple. Since I've used Jackd before, my frames and buffer rates and everything were already set up beforehand; however, if you happen not to know what to do, everything that you need is provided in epiphone's booklet. Just find the appropriate settings in Jackd that map to the ones in the ASIO4ALL interface, and it should be good to go. Then all you need to do is fiddle around with Rakarrak. A good friend of mine uses Guitar Rig 4 (and we play a lot together so I've used it extensively), and, while I'm trying not to be biased, I think Rakarrak is easier to use compared to Guitar Rig, and therefore it's easier to make it sound better (and the presets that come with it are beautiful as well). After a few hours of fiddling I was able to not only replicate my sound (which has been developed during about 3 years with my Tonelab LE), but also to actually improve it. Of course guitar rig has many many more options and effects built in, and I'll make a Guitar Rig setup for the future, just as an alternative and because at some point I will probably find myself wanting those. I find myself playing so much more than I used to... Huge thumbs up to Epiphone for making the guitar work with ASIO and not some private driver software, now everyone can enjoy this wonderful piece of gear no matter what OS we are using. I really can't stress how grateful I am, and how much of a great decision that was. I really hope they don't change their stance in the future. Also, I promise that pictures will come at some point of my sibling LPs :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RaSTuS Posted December 29, 2011 Share Posted December 29, 2011 Excellent news, glad you got it working ok, thanks for the run down on how to route it. Was the ASIO driver hard to find ??? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aethyr Posted December 29, 2011 Author Share Posted December 29, 2011 Excellent news, glad you got it working ok, thanks for the run down on how to route it. Was the ASIO driver hard to find ??? Actually no, I realised from my previous thread when you mentioned it that it is installed by default in Linux Mint Debian (which is my distro of choice). It's probably just installed by default in Debian and its derivatives (Ubuntu,Mint etc), I think it comes with running ALSA. So no sweat there either, all you really need to setup manually is Jackd. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RaSTuS Posted December 29, 2011 Share Posted December 29, 2011 Excellent news, glad you got it working ok, thanks for the run down on how to route it. Was the ASIO driver hard to find ??? Actually no, I realised from my previous thread when you mentioned it that it is installed by default in Linux Mint Debian (which is my distro of choice). It's probably just installed by default in Debian and its derivatives (Ubuntu,Mint etc), I think it comes with running ALSA. So no sweat there either, all you really need to setup manually is Jackd. Yeah, I thought ASIO would be the key, glad you got working so well, chalk another one up for Linux. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LongMan Posted December 29, 2011 Share Posted December 29, 2011 Huge thumbs up to Epiphone for making the guitar work with ASIO and not some private driver software, now everyone can enjoy this wonderful piece of gear no matter what OS we are using. Fortunately the compatibility of USB Audio and MIDI devices changed to the better over the years. Nowadays manufacturers have a wide choice of class compliant USB Audio and MIDI chips. Anything else than class compliant for such fairly simple tasks as 2 channel audio output would be an absolute no-go for me. Special drivers are only necessary for extended functionality of multi channel interfaces with sophisticated hardware. Plus a guitar company like Epiphone surely does not deal with software, they would delegate that task to a 3rd party company. We had that situation some 6-7 years ago with small USB Audio devices of several brands, and it was most of the time unsatisfying. Rare updates, bugs that were never fixed, weak driver performance, no support for certain operating systems. Later on software companies that programmed the drivers went out of business, and your audio interface was just useless as a brick. With class compliant devices the job of driver programming is left to the guys who know their job, the driver is built right into the OS. And as you said you might use the device cross platform without hassle. This is not only Windows/Mac OS/Linux, but also more and more iOS and Android. So if a guitar offers a USB Audio output, it should be no problem to connect it to e.g. an iPad, or run it in a Linux environment. This is a feature I do expect as a standard nowadays. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aethyr Posted December 30, 2011 Author Share Posted December 30, 2011 @ LongMan: While I certainly agree with all of that, in the back of my head I still remember the time when each random little device carried its own proprietary driver and compatibility was a huge issue... And I had this fear when I bought the guitar, so it was a pleasant surprise to find out it worked with ASIO. I have another question if someone owns an Ultra III. When both the USB Socket and the Quarter jack are plugged in, I get some high frequency feedback. Am I to assume that the guitar was not meant to be played normally while plugged in a PC? In general the feedback from the USB Socket is quite significant... Perhaps a future consideration for the Ultra series would be a built in noise reduction for the USB signal... After all, Epiphone has fit so much on this guitar already Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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