Axe-FX (A Love Story?) Rd.1

[JiveTurkey]

I go back and forth between being proud of being able to "master editing" on the device and not necessarily minding when confronted with easier ways to skin the same cat

The deep/confusing aspect of FAS UI is not in the deep parameters of any amp or effects block so much as just a layer of kludge on top of the on device UI itself. I try to stay away from the editor 95% of the time (and am largely successful at that endeavor) but footswitch/modifier/controller config is a nightmare on device. Playing guitar is supposed to be visceral; so watching an 8 hour course when all you want to do is fire up a Recto and rip your face is not a good trade off.

I feel like if most didn't universally like the tones; we'd be getting a lecture on how we'd be better served taking guitar lessons instead of twisting knobs and firing up editors

At the same time; I also get that complaining about it incessantly isn't going to really provoke any sort of seismic shift. So I just deal with the things that do drive me nuts and enjoy the

 

[laxu]

is the on-device UI of the Fractal difficult to use, given the breadth of options presented, or is it just not intuitive? There’s a difference between “intuitive” and “difficult”. I think it’s just not intuitive. Not like the HX Stomp, which is really easy to use without even looking at a manual.

It's not intuitive or consistent. There's a constant mental check going on where you have to remember what to press next to do the thing you want, combined with awkward button placement so there's a lot of back and forth hand movement required to operate it.

I suppose the right way would be to record a loop, play the loop and use both hands to edit everything on the unit but most people including myself do something like "tweak a setting, strum a bit, tweak a setting, strum some more."

 

[Rock Chalk]

Just curious.....all you guys that are tweaking a lot on the hardware.....is this with the unit on the floor or on a desk?

 

[paisleywookiee]

It's not intuitive or consistent. There's a constant mental check going on where you have to remember what to press next to do the thing you want, combined with awkward button placement so there's a lot of back and forth hand movement required to operate it.

I suppose the right way would be to record a loop, play the loop and use both hands to edit everything on the unit but most people including myself do something like "tweak a setting, strum a bit, tweak a setting, strum some more."

 

[TSJMajesty]

Just curious.....all you guys that are tweaking a lot on the hardware.....is this with the unit on the floor or on a desk?

Mine's (Axe III) in a rack at eye level (I sit while practicing/playing), right next to my desk. And I use the hardware about 5 times as much as the editor.

 

[Stratzrus]

I try to stay away from the editor 95% of the time (and am largely successful at that endeavor) but footswitch/modifier/controller config is a nightmare on device.

Agreed. I've done that stuff on the device as well. Small tone, volume, gain adjustments, and minor tweaks on time based effects are easy to do but yes, using the UI for the footswitch/modifier/controller configuration changes is a PITA.

Just curious.....all you guys that are tweaking a lot on the hardware.....is this with the unit on the floor or on a desk?

With both the III and the FM9 I have them elevated when tweaking.

 

[paisleywookiee]

Mine's (Axe III) in a rack at eye level (I sit while practicing/playing), right next to my desk. And I use the hardware about 5 times as much as the editor.

I have mine on a rack shelf (one of those chrome utility shelves), and I’d love something that holds the FM9 at like a 45-60 degree angle, for easy editing. Sometimes, I just don’t want to look at a computer.

 

[SeeD]

Figured it out. The “Number” row is what you have to change to cycle cabs.

View attachment 12453

 

[holoholo]

Great list! My delivery landed in the nest yesterday. I spent about an hour with it last night straight out of the box for some initial “how intuitively does this work for a new person” impressions, before I RTFM (as I always do. I’m weird. I enjoy reading manuals.)

My first thoughts:

• Everything everyone has said over and over about the onboard UI is painfully true. It’s the inconsistency of it that makes it hilariously obtuse. I did manage to mostly figure things out on my own in that hour of use, but even after doing so I had to keep re-figuring them out because you have to memorize the inconsistencies. (Major props to @Digital Igloo here. I always liked the Helix UI, but it really drove home how well thought-out it is after using the FM9.)
• Build quality feels fantastic. Extremely solid all around.
• Does it immediately sound significantly better than my Helix Floor, without comparing them side by side in an A/B? Nope. The most noticeable thing to me is a slight difference in the attack, sustain and decay of amp distortion. It’s a bit smoother than Helix, and the decay of distortion on held notes tapers off in a more cohesive way. On some Helix amp models, the decay kinda hits a point where it falls off and gets brittle, making the “warts” sound more disconnected (e.g. ye olde squirrels of yore).
• Marshalls do sound nice. The kerrang is there. Bright caps help!
• Most clean Fender amps don’t sound better than Helix to me at first crack, and Helix’s Hot Springs reverb blows all of the current FM9 spring verbs out of the water. I’m glad Cliff is revamping the spring verb because you can’t really get any of the FM9 verbs to “drip.” The best you can do is an odd artificial-sounding boinggg that does not sound like a Fender reverb tank.
• Other reverbs sound nice. Better-sounding than the newer Dynamic Reverbs in Helix? I don’t really think so, but the Fractal ones are more fine-tunable, so if you want to treat it like a mixing engineer and really shape the reverb EQ around each tone, you can. Built-in ducking is a high-end feature for sure.
• Level meters per-block is a neat visual ref, even though you shouldn’t really need it. Real pedals don’t have it, and it takes some pretty silly gainstaging to drive the floating point math in modern modelers into digital clipping.
• Room mic settings in Dynacabs is nice to have. I think the Dynamic Ambience reverb in Helix gets you there too though, and I’m suspicious that the FM9 “room mics” are also just reverb, since you can specify it as Hall or Room shaped.
• I probably just missed it, but I don’t recall seeing a 45-degree off-axis option for the Dynacab mics. Mic options are a lot more limited than Helix’s. I’ll need to compare the sound quality of the DynaCabs vs. Helix cabs, but at first blush I think the Helix offers more variety here with essentially the same implementation and capture processes.
• Still need to test out the drives and fuzzes and see if they’re noticeably better than Helix.

I could go on for a while but I’ll stop there for now. My first-impressions summary is: if I tried the FM9 in isolation, without the Helix beside it to directly compare tones and split hairs, would I take it over the Helix? The honest answer for me right now, is no.

It may have a slight edge in sound quality/feel/response/decay, for some of the amp models. It has a lot more audio engineering-level tweakability to some of its blocks. It has more amp and reverb models, but less variety in most everything else like drives and other pedals.

I’ll dig in more this weekend and really learn it, and see if any of my first impressions change. I expect that some will, and maybe the differences will grow more obvious as my ears get more familiar with the Fractal.

Welp this was sobering. Thanks for the detailed write up.

 

[Stone]

ME --->

Use only Bottom Footswitches, everything else done on the Editor which I absolutely love

 

[Stone]

Great list! My delivery landed in the nest yesterday. I spent about an hour with it last night straight out of the box for some initial “how intuitively does this work for a new person” impressions, before I RTFM (as I always do. I’m weird. I enjoy reading manuals.)

My first thoughts:

• Everything everyone has said over and over about the onboard UI is painfully true. It’s the inconsistency of it that makes it hilariously obtuse. I did manage to mostly figure things out on my own in that hour of use, but even after doing so I had to keep re-figuring them out because you have to memorize the inconsistencies. (Major props to @Digital Igloo here. I always liked the Helix UI, but it really drove home how well thought-out it is after using the FM9.)
• Build quality feels fantastic. Extremely solid all around.
• Does it immediately sound significantly better than my Helix Floor, without comparing them side by side in an A/B? Nope. The most noticeable thing to me is a slight difference in the attack, sustain and decay of amp distortion. It’s a bit smoother than Helix, and the decay of distortion on held notes tapers off in a more cohesive way. On some Helix amp models, the decay kinda hits a point where it falls off and gets brittle, making the “warts” sound more disconnected (e.g. ye olde squirrels of yore).
• Marshalls do sound nice. The kerrang is there. Bright caps help!
• Most clean Fender amps don’t sound better than Helix to me at first crack, and Helix’s Hot Springs reverb blows all of the current FM9 spring verbs out of the water. I’m glad Cliff is revamping the spring verb because you can’t really get any of the FM9 verbs to “drip.” The best you can do is an odd artificial-sounding boinggg that does not sound like a Fender reverb tank.
• Other reverbs sound nice. Better-sounding than the newer Dynamic Reverbs in Helix? I don’t really think so, but the Fractal ones are more fine-tunable, so if you want to treat it like a mixing engineer and really shape the reverb EQ around each tone, you can. Built-in ducking is a high-end feature for sure.
• Level meters per-block is a neat visual ref, even though you shouldn’t really need it. Real pedals don’t have it, and it takes some pretty silly gainstaging to drive the floating point math in modern modelers into digital clipping.
• Room mic settings in Dynacabs is nice to have. I think the Dynamic Ambience reverb in Helix gets you there too though, and I’m suspicious that the FM9 “room mics” are also just reverb, since you can specify it as Hall or Room shaped.
• I probably just missed it, but I don’t recall seeing a 45-degree off-axis option for the Dynacab mics. Mic options are a lot more limited than Helix’s. I’ll need to compare the sound quality of the DynaCabs vs. Helix cabs, but at first blush I think the Helix offers more variety here with essentially the same implementation and capture processes.
• Still need to test out the drives and fuzzes and see if they’re noticeably better than Helix.

I could go on for a while but I’ll stop there for now. My first-impressions summary is: if I tried the FM9 in isolation, without the Helix beside it to directly compare tones and split hairs, would I take it over the Helix? The honest answer for me right now, is no.

It may have a slight edge in sound quality/feel/response/decay, for some of the amp models. It has a lot more audio engineering-level tweakability to some of its blocks. It has more amp and reverb models, but less variety in most everything else like drives and other pedals.

I’ll dig in more this weekend and really learn it, and see if any of my first impressions change. I expect that some will, and maybe the differences will grow more obvious as my ears get more familiar with the Fractal.

I did A/B the Helix and the FM9 side by side for a while and for me was the opposite again not saying was night and day but for me I found was a big difference in the tones, also was easier to get good tones I struggled with the Helix using EQ'ing and what not i always managed to get the tone was just harder and longer process, i also noticed the feel was different thats hard to explain and i also noticed that parameter settings made a bigger difference in the tone, all in all I preferred the Fractal so Sold the Helix
But thats me and we all know
YMMV


Cheers

 

[SwirlyMaple]

ME --->

View attachment 12460

Use only Bottom Footswitches, everything else done on the Editor which I absolutely love

Clean setup! Looks great!

 

[SwirlyMaple]

Welp this was sobering. Thanks for the detailed write up.

Remember it’s just my first-glance opinion after an hour of initial plunking around. After spending some more time with it I’ll probably have revisions to some of those opinions. (Except the onboard UI and the spring reverb opinions… those aren’t changing )

 

[Stone]

Remember it’s just my first-glance opinion after an hour of initial plunking around. After spending some more time with it I’ll probably have revisions to some of those opinions. (Except the onboard UI and the spring reverb opinions… those aren’t changing )

Its cleaner now fixed all me wires

 

[Whizzinby]

It's not intuitive or consistent. There's a constant mental check going on where you have to remember what to press next to do the thing you want, combined with awkward button placement so there's a lot of back and forth hand movement required to operate it.

Bingo. There aren’t any tasks where you just go on autopilot. You have to make very conscious decisions, and several of them it feels like you’re just making educated guesses. lol

 

[Whizzinby]

At the same time; I also get that complaining about it incessantly isn't going to really provoke any sort of seismic shift. So I just deal with the things that do drive me nuts and enjoy the

To be fair I’ve only owned it a week, so I’m still comfortably in a grace period, right?

I’m about to attempt to build a preset from scratch on-device.

My life has been building towards this moment…

 

[yeky83]

I’m suspicious that the FM9 “room mics” are also just reverb, since you can specify it as Hall or Room shaped.

Of course it is, wut is there to be suspicious about?

 

[paisleywookiee]

To be fair I’ve only owned it a week, so I’m still comfortably in a grace period, right?

I’m about to attempt to build a preset from scratch on-device.

My life has building towards this moment…

It’s really not that bad. No, it’s not intuitive. At all. But you can do it. I wanted to learn the device well enough that I didn’t need to always Have a computer, so I spent a lot of time creating shit from scratch.

 

[SwirlyMaple]

Of course it is, wut is there to be suspicious about?

Just wasn't sure if room mic stereo IRs were captured along with all the close-mic'd captures when the DynaCabs were created. Some IR vendors do include room mic IRs with their captures.

 

[SwirlyMaple]

It’s really not that bad. No, it’s not intuitive. At all. But you can do it. I wanted to learn the device well enough that I didn’t need to always Have a computer, so I spent a lot of time creating shit from scratch.

Oh, it's definitely functional. Don't get me wrong. It's mainly the way that buttons do different things in different contexts without any indication of what it will be until you memorize each case. Like how clicking the big knob often does nothing; sometimes works like a back button... and enter? It appears to only be "enter" in very limited cases.

Full disclosure, I am a weirdo who likes challenges and puzzles and this sort of madness actually appeals to me. I enjoy conquering things like this and learning them back-to-front. But thinking in terms of sane people who just want to buy a thing and be able to operate it, I can see very clearly where the reputation has come from. It's a scattershot UI of inconsistent controls, menu diving, screen tabbing, context-dependent button functionality (which rarely matches the text above the button)... sometimes the scroll wheel navigates, sometimes the arrow keys navigate... etc.

Consider this horse fully beateth by me. I'm not complaining so much as sharing first-time impressions from a longtime Helix user, new Fractal user.