Originally Posted by: darickmendes

The Amp I have is line 6 spider V20 mxll

So, in this case, Line 6 has made a simple looking interface but made it confusing to use. Sure, it's east to look at FX1 (orange), FX2 (blue) or FX3 (green). What on earth do they do?

First, each color of FX buttons represents a type of effect like Delay and stuff like that. For your model, it is a follows:

FX1 (orange) - Drives

FX2 (blue) - Modulation

FX3 (green) - Delay

In the simplest terms, when you've selected that FX button, whateverever effect is assigned to that button, will be turned on. To adjust how much of that effect you want to hear, the FX knob will let you meter how much of it you dial in.

The confusing part is; what the heck are the actual effects under that button?! That took some looking and honestly, I'm not sure that it was really super-clear to me. The best I can tell is that you can also connect to a PC to assign and edit what effect you're using in each. I won't pretend to say that sounds awesome but without having used the amp, I'm guessing that each of the effects is a simple preset and if you want to get more than that, you cgotta connect to your computer. Sigh.....

Otherwise, to dial in metal-type tones on the other parts of the amp, these are in the Crunch, Chink and Insane preset knob on the left end of the amp face. The titles explain a lot. To dial in tone, I would zero everything out and keep the volume knob at about the 10 o'clock position while adjusting (once you like it...then jam away! I would set the tone knob to noon to start. Then I would start chunking on a chord (like an open E power chord) and start adjusting that Drive knob up until you've reach a 'ckunky' tone level you kinda like. Then, start messing with that Tone knob again to fine tune things. LAST, dial in some Reverb. That's just something to add to taste. After that, you can make adjustments to the Volume and the Master to get you that last little bit of fine tuning.

Thing is; you do have to mess around with knobs. I've always messed with them. Always. So get used to the practicing how to dial in tone. I always start with most stuff at zero and work up.

Those FX knobs though, not sure that was a great design by Line 6. Once you get the hand of it, they may be great but Line 6 does a poor job of helping users on that one.