I

NTRODUCTION

:  

W

ELCOME

 T

HE

 POD...

1 • 3

I

NTRODUCTION

W

ELCOME

 T

HE

 POD...

Thank you for inviting POD home with you. Whether you use your POD as a 
direct recording miracle, a stomp box on steroids, for practice, or as a creative 
digital signal processing tool – and heck, why should it be just one? – we think 
you’ll agree that POD is about the most amazing thing to happen to electric guitar 
since – well, since the guitar amplifier itself. POD mines the tonal heritage of the 
past forty years of guitar amplifier design and matches it up with the kind of digital 
signal processing magic that will still be ahead of its time in the next century.

How does POD help you create a guitar tone that is out of this world, and then get 
that tone wherever you need it? Easy! It’s…

M

ODELING

Modeling: just what is it, and why is it so important? (By the way, you sent in that 
registration card or did it on the web, right? OK, just checking.)

Tubes, we can all agree, are the heart and soul of every legendary guitar amp and 
are responsible for the warm, harmonic-rich tone quality of those amps. Solid state 
devices (transistors) are simply unable to duplicate tube warmth and performance. 
And “hybrids” – a tube in a circuit along with a bunch of transistors – are really a 
vain attempt at warming up a transistor-based tone. They fall short in any 
comparison to a 100% tube circuit. So that’s it – tubes or nothin’, right? Well, not 
any more....

You see, the engineers at Line 6, being an adventurous lot, and totally pumped 
about this whole guitar tone thing as well, decided to stock up on the coffee, bust 
out the engineering equipment, and get down to learning everything there is to 
know about tubes. Riding high on the caffeine wave, they began a three-year 
project to analyze and map out exactly how different types of tubes respond under 
various conditions typical of guitar amplifier design. How tubes process an input