As I use my HD500 more and become more familiar with it, I like it more and more. I am able to get around on the unit itself and can get around in it quickliy with HD Edit program. It did make a huge difference when I got the powered speaker to run it through.

Having a powered speaker to test volume levels between patches has been very important to getting these set right. Just remember to save after each level adjustment for the levels to stay that way next time. I found a clean tone I started to work on that I got from the HD Edit. It has 2 amps, the Gibson and Hiwatt and nothing else, great clean patch to start with, I'm starting by adding my OD and Distortion pedals.

Yes, I have downloaded patches from the Line 6 Custom Tone site http://line6.com/customtone/browse/podhd500/.

I downloaded several and kept the Eric Johnson "EJ Clean" and the Lincoln Brewster "Clean Lincoln". I thought it gave me a headstart on getting the sounds I wanted. It's easy to download, try them out, then discard them if you don't like them. What I do is download 3-4 to the board and then play with them for a couple of days, keep the ones I like. You will have to tweak each sound to your liking and adjust the volume. Volumes vary greatly, so be careful. The Lincoln Brewster patch is very loud but sounds great. Then I check out each of the effects on 5-8 and change those to the effects I use most frequently. The one issue with some of these patches is that you don't know how it all ties together, so I end up taking things out to hear what is coloring the sound so I can use it on my own patches.

I also downloaded the setlist I mentioned previously that had 16 different amps with a CLEAN, SLIGHTLY DIRTY, CRUNCH and SOLO setting for each amp model. It was created by a Line 6 expert, so it's very usable. That was actually in the HD500 forum http://line6.com/support/thread/46526 You have to be logged in to the forum to see this. Same thing - tweak, adjust volumes.

There was one other setlist I downloaded. One guy had a patch for every song in every set. After a few I was overwhelmed so I went back to my originals. it's here: http://line6.com/support/thread/58001 This made me realize that you can create a patch that sounds exactly like the guitar on the recording. But sometimes the original guitar sound is not that good when you playing live in 2012 (especially on 60's songs).

Good luck

Victor

Hey fellas, be careful if you hook the HD500 up to your computer to edit patches. There's some bug which can cause a sudden very loud high pitched squeal to emit from the unit. Line 6 is supposed to issue a fix by the end of this week, but we'll see.

http://line6.com/support...099?start=0&tstart=0