Well, I wish I could say it has been plug and play, but it has been about a year of tweaking and research, and I am finally at the stage where I almost cannot create a bad tone, and everything sounds good (playing, sour/missed notes not included) ............I run it FRFR, straight into the house, and the tones on my recordings (I have a few more I use) are exactly what they sound like comign out of the house.........I use a house amp on stage as a monitor only, just dial down all the gain and tweak highs/lows to match.
I actually thought I could do better and ordered a Kemper, which I had for about two weeks. Liked a million clean tones, bu couldn't come close to repliating my lead tone, and among havign to figure out a whole new operaing system, trying to figure out how to make the HD500 into a MIDI controller for the Kemper, spending a vast amount of time dialing in everything and learning how it all affects the other parameters, etc. etc., I just don't have that kind of time, so I kept the HD500 and am very happy. None of my patches are even close to stock, sometimes pulling some high-rated tones off of the L6 customtone can give you ideas and a good starting point for tweaking your own sounds, and Meambobo's high gain tone guide has also been a big help. I can walk off stage in 30 seconds, it is great.