Fractal Talk

[fretworn]

TBH. I have started putting people who post nothing but AI memes to every thread on ignore until they get over it.

That so awesome …

pls never never take me off IGNORE

Seriously

Lmao

 

[Frodebro]

Sigh...I did too, man, That being said, "easy" to just get in a block and change parameters, yes. Anything more than that, I'll just wait until I get back home to do it in Axe-Edit. I already detailed here how many extra menus and button presses even common stuff suffers from.

All of the major stuff I do is in Axe Edit, but i have added effects and done “normal” tweaks at rehearsals without getting the drummer antsy.

 

[jellodog]

Every user can resize the thumbnail, so if you want to post pics, scale them to a reasonable size. I try to do this too because those huge AI pics are annoying when they take the whole screen.

IKR? Your thoughtful diligence is appreciated.

Really tried explaining / requesting that in this rant, and it had little to no effect:

https://thegearforum.com/threads/did-you-know-that-when-you-post-an-image.3537/

 

[la szum]

Yup so I don't play loud and Did not like it, so that's a No Go for me, Ill just keep my DK-24 adjusted and Intonated and keep it @ Eb
there is always a next guitar waiting
Thanks all for the Input
you guys are the best

Curious where you placed it in your chain. I know that matters, and can matter quite a lot.

 

[DrewJD82]

Every user can resize the thumbnail, so if you want to post pics, scale them to a reasonable size. I try to do this too because those huge AI pics are annoying when they take the whole screen.

Maybe the system let's you set a default scaled size for pics? You can always click them to see the full size.

I can’t remember the final result of the auto/default scaling, or maybe we were talking about it and got sidetracked, but we were hoping to implement something like that to keep threads easy to read.

Even if we made a rule about re-sizing pics, herding cats and all that.

 

[SwirlyMaple]

For anyone who was following my faulty FM9 and return saga, just wanted to give this final update now that my old one has made it back to New Hampshire:

Fractal has refunded my entire original purchase, including the overnight shipping I paid for. I'm quite happy with this; we're square. Thanks @FractalAudio , and I'm loving the other FM9 I bought to replace it.

 

[Frodebro]

For anyone who was following my faulty FM9 and return saga, just wanted to give this final update now that my old one has made it back to New Hampshire:

Fractal has refunded my entire original purchase, including the overnight shipping I paid for. I'm quite happy with this; we're square. Thanks @FractalAudio , and I'm loving the other FM9 I bought to replace it.

Very happy to hear that! They're a stand up company that fully understands the importance of great customer service.

 

[unix-guy]

I'm ordering a Strat bari conversion neck from them. Have an offset body here cut for a trio of single coils. I plan to use these Duncan stacked 'buckers I have here in it.

I bought one from @hippietim and quite enjoy it. Attached to a GFS Tele in Burgundy Mist.

 

[unix-guy]

This is why my long-time Forum habit is to cut my typed lines short,
and NOT let them run the entire length allowed.

Horizontal scrolling is the Debul's work.

For Xenforo forums such as here and Fractal, it's not needed. They do a great job of wrapping the text.

 

[norminal]

What’s blown me away is non-ironic mullets coming back. Just met with a group of contractors yesterday to start bidding out an office build and I thought one of them was Theo Von.

My nephew has a mullet. They’re all the rage these days.

 

[2112]

Me circa '92. Mullet in full force.

 

[SwirlyMaple]

Me circa '92. Mullet in full force.

View attachment 14922

Now that's a true LEGEND!!!

 

[2112]

New amps are sounding phenomenal. @FractalAudio thanks for modeling the low input of the 800's, and big ups to @James Freeman for sharing his knowledge!

 

[Orvillain]

Sigh...I did too, man, That being said, "easy" to just get in a block and change parameters, yes. Anything more than that, I'll just wait until I get back home to do it in Axe-Edit. I already detailed here how many extra menus and button presses even common stuff suffers from.

Do you think that is because Axe Edit is so good and convenient, that it just makes using any hardware more cumbersome and boring?

The TC Toneprint editor for example. Pretty crap software, not intuitive, and difficult to use.
Editing a TC G-System. Blerghhhh.
Editing the Meris LVX. More difficult than editing the Axe III.
Doing a ton of funny combination of button presses on the Strymon Volante to access hidden features. Not THAT intuitive compared to Axe Edit either.
The menu diving on the Boss 500 effects. Nowhere near as lovely to use as Axe Edit is.
Scrolling through the menus on a Kemper, having to squint to read the tiny display and understand what each parameter does because they are often laid out poorly?? Chairman laow that.

I don't really know how they could significantly improve the experience of editing on the Axe III hardware; I don't include adding a few extra pages or button shortcuts. I'm talking about meaningful changes. And without ripping out a ton of functionality, I just don't see how they could make it any easier.

Helix is a lot easier to use, and a lot more enjoyable to use, and sounds just as good in many many many scenarios. So I think this is why I have glommed onto these two platforms right now; Helix for the quick fun-time stuff, AxeIII for the deep nerdy stuff.

 

[laxu]

Do you think that is because Axe Edit is so good and convenient, that it just makes using any hardware more cumbersome and boring?

The TC Toneprint editor for example. Pretty crap software, not intuitive, and difficult to use.
Editing a TC G-System. Blerghhhh.
Editing the Meris LVX. More difficult than editing the Axe III.
Doing a ton of funny combination of button presses on the Strymon Volante to access hidden features. Not THAT intuitive compared to Axe Edit either.
The menu diving on the Boss 500 effects. Nowhere near as lovely to use as Axe Edit is.
Scrolling through the menus on a Kemper, having to squint to read the tiny display and understand what each parameter does because they are often laid out poorly?? Chairman laow that.

I don't really know how they could significantly improve the experience of editing on the Axe III hardware; I don't include adding a few extra pages or button shortcuts. I'm talking about meaningful changes. And without ripping out a ton of functionality, I just don't see how they could make it any easier.

Helix is a lot easier to use, and a lot more enjoyable to use, and sounds just as good in many many many scenarios. So I think this is why I have glommed onto these two platforms right now; Helix for the quick fun-time stuff, AxeIII for the deep nerdy stuff.

Warning, UI/UX stuff incoming! You know this sort of posts are just bait for me, right?

For Strymon, the issues are these:

• Unlabeled secondary controls.
• Accessing secondary controls is inconsistent and complicated. "Hold this tiny button or two tiny buttons", "Hold this footswitch, then remember which knob you have to turn".
• No visibility to presets without a lot of knob twiddling to find the stored setting. When they finally get the Nixie 2 software to support all the pedals, this will be at least solved. It honestly should have been done years before for the Volante/Nightsky/Sunset/Riverside at least.

Eventide's solution of a dedicated "control layer shift" toggle button and printed secondary controls is so much better, even though it also has the preset visibility problem. It's unavoidable on devices without displays or LED indicators for values.

For Fractal, the issue is almost entirely about navigation on the hardware. There's extra mental steps you need to do:

• Enter or Edit to open stuff? 90% it's Enter, but then it isn't...
• Paging or arrows? Most of the time these are consistent, but then you might have arrows change an EQ type (Amp block graphic EQ for example), or change presets/scenes (Home). It's extra "need to know and remember" stuff.
• The number of different views is high. Knobs, lists, graphs, EQs, signal flow layout. When a block can have many of these, it takes a moment to reorient yourself to where you are in that new view and what you want to press next. Helix never has this issue because it's got only two views: signal flow + parameters, list view for selecting an effect type.
• On Axe-Edit or Helix hw you always see the signal flow so it's easier to track where you are and what's next if you move between blocks.

There's a lot of distance between the Fractal navigation controls and the knobs under the screen. I don't know about you, but I often just get frustrated by the cramped under-screen knobs and instead just leave my hand around the navigation controls and use the big wheel because it's less back and forth when you have another hand holding your guitar.

Axe-Edit avoids most of these issues because you always see the signal flow, and most views are more consistent because they don't swap between knobs, lists etc. It has a lot more expected behavior in where those controls are placed, and you get a lot of speed from being able to click things with a mouse and use a scroll wheel or dragging the control to adjust them.

To compare Axe-Edit with HX-Edit or Helix Native, Helix's computer editing experience is worse because:

• Scroll behavior is terrible. One pixel difference can mean "adjust a slider" vs "scroll the list." There are some gaps between the sliders so if your cursor lands there, instead of adjusting the control it scrolls the list.
• There's no grouping of parameters, or assigning any sort of importance value to them via color coding, font choices etc. "Hum" is equivalent to "Gain" for example when they really are nowhere near equivalent. Axe-Edit at least does some grouping depending on the block/page.
• It doesn't scale. I don't know if HX Edit is better, but Helix Native simply expands the area for controls and lists. Which is most of the time not useful when things are smaller than you'd like on screen.

It's kinda funny to have this sort of divide where the Helix or QC is nicer to work with from the hardware but Fractal has the better computer editing experience.

While Fractal has a good number of low-hanging fruit UI issues they could solve with software updates (like say sort/filter of things, preset/cab grouping, naming conventions, button function consistency), the hardware control layout is a problem they can't solve for this gen. I hope they ditch it for their next gen products because it's been about the same since the first gen and it was never good. From Axe-Fx 2 -> 3 they also lost some of the few good dedicated buttons from the Axe-Fx 2: quick access to various setup menus.

It's a shame the LED ring knobs on the AX8 never got to see another iteration because to me those were a perfect candidate for context-based editing, or mapping custom controls to them. The Perform view is not the same thing because it requires navigation, the under screen knobs are cramped together and you need to make sure you are in the Perform view in the first place. The fastest way to navigate to it requires 2-4 clicks. Home, Home again to reset to the preset/scene view if you are not in it, Page right x1 for per preset or x2 for global Perform view. Then maybe more to select the right row.

While you might think, "what's a few clicks!", compare this to Helix where it takes one click to go to Amp block thanks to the dedicated button, and one capacitive footswitch tap to go to a block. The more steps you need to do for a regularly repeated task, the more annoying it gets.

This is why I don't like the HX Stomp and might avoid the HX One too - if e.g the Helix Amp block's first page's 3 parameters are Drive, Bass and Mid, you need to page a few times to adjust Drive, Ch vol and Master. This ends up in a lot of paging back and forth when you tweak one and might want to adjust another again. Similar issues occur depending on the effect type, e.g Reverb mix is often on 2nd page and not consistently the 2nd or 3rd control on that page on all reverb types. Fractal actually has more consistency for parameter order!

I know y'all will say "bah, hogwash, who cares!" about this stuff, but there's a lot of small things that can be accounted for in design that can make the user experience just that extra 2% more pleasant. Add enough "extra 2%" improvements and you have something that is really great to use. None of the current modelers are quite there yet.

 

[Orvillain]

I know y'all will say "bah, hogwash, who cares!" about this stuff, but there's a lot of small things that can be accounted for in design that can make the user experience just that extra 2% more pleasant. Add enough "extra 2%" improvements and you have something that is really great to use. None of the current modelers are quite there yet.

Nah, I wouldn't say that. I've been telling the executive team the 2% rule for a few years now.

It isn't so disimilar to click-through-rates in a marketing sense. Every click you add, you lose 50% of your audience. I think that is the typically stated stat. Don't know how true it is, but the principle of it is what matters.

My point was, if you compare the AxeIII hardware experience to other bits of gear of a similar capability and complexity - Helix, QC, TMP do not fall into this category - then you'll find many many many devices have similar issues.

Try a Lexicon hardware reverb; they're a nightmare to use!

 

[Orvillain]

Helix never has this issue because it's got only two views: signal flow + parameters, list view for selecting an effect type.

I think you're being too kind to Helix there. It has much more going on than two simple views.

- Signal view - which shows and hides various capabilities based on your routing setup, which I don't particularly like (I want to always see all 4 lanes, for example)
- Pedal edit view where you have to rely on the scribble strips
- Command centre view, which is a distinct workflow of its own
- capacitance "assignment" view - which is a totally different experience to the command centre view, yet does similar things
- Preset browser and block browser, both of which have their own perculiarities; the preset browser has a bunch of sub functionality that is more or less the exact same kind of "nested" thing as what you get on the Axe III


It seems to me that a lot of people's complaints about Axe III hardware centre on them not using it enough for the controls to become 2nd nature, and also they dislike lists.

To be fair, it was WAY worse on the Axe II, and those old green screens didn't do them any favours back then either.

 

[laxu]

I think you're being too kind to Helix there. It has much more going on than two simple views.

- Signal view - which shows and hides various capabilities based on your routing setup, which I don't particularly like (I want to always see all 4 lanes, for example)
- Pedal edit view where you have to rely on the scribble strips
- Command centre view, which is a distinct workflow of its own
- capacitance "assignment" view - which is a totally different experience to the command centre view, yet does similar things
- Preset browser and block browser, both of which have their own perculiarities; the preset browser has a bunch of sub functionality that is more or less the exact same kind of "nested" thing as what you get on the Axe III

I was mainly counting the views that you regularly use for block editing here, similar to not including Fractal modifiers, setup menus or browser windows.

My point was, if you compare the AxeIII hardware experience to other bits of gear of a similar capability and complexity - Helix, QC, TMP do not fall into this category - then you'll find many many many devices have similar issues.

Try a Lexicon hardware reverb; they're a nightmare to use!

A lot of older rack gear is definitely a nightmare. 1U + small display + lots of menuing.

I'm not too familiar with what is out there for rack gear, but is there actually anything that is truly a great, modern user experience? The format itself seems quite limiting for anything that absolutely requires a display. You either end up with some 5U monstrosity or have to compromise. Axe-Fx 3 and Helix Rack are 3U mainly due to the front panel. By comparison it's easier to fit a lot of display on a floor/desk unit.

Personally I feel the Axe-Fx IV as a rack unit should be just a I/O and DSP brain you use entirely with Axe-Edit and external knob controllers.

 

[eggpl@nt]

I don't usually have many comments or complaints on UI in general. I've become quite comfortable with both the Axe and the Helix. I know this is Fractal talk, but I do have a quibble with the Helix UI that I think Fractal nails. Despite the many comments on how you might get to one setting or another, I know where everything is. The location of each setting is consistent.

Here's what bugs me about Helix: Look at, for example, the Vitriol Lead vs the Solo Lead OD. Respectfully, why the fuck does Line 6 change the order of the settings for each amp. Why is Presence with the "normal controls" for the Solo and at the bottom for the Vitriol?

I understand stuffing Ch Vol with the Master, but IMHO, any of the "bonus" controls like sag, bias, etc, should be stuffed after or below the "normal" guitar amp controls.

Someone may come behind and say "this is actually good because..." and I'd honestly love to hear it because I do not understand this design choice, and it seems silly to me.

Someone smarter than me, EDUCATE ME PLS.

 

[Orvillain]

I'm not too familiar with what is out there for rack gear, but is there actually anything that is truly a great, modern user experience? The format itself seems quite limiting for anything that absolutely requires a display. You either end up with some 5U monstrosity or have to compromise. Axe-Fx 3 and Helix Rack are 3U mainly due to the front panel. By comparison it's easier to fit a lot of display on a floor/desk unit.

I think when looking at rack based gear, there isn't much out there in guitar or studio effect land that gives you all of the capabilities of something like the AxeIII or Helix.

I mean... this thing:

Looks deceptively simple, but is an absolute nightmare to use. I hated it, even after having it in the old fxpansion studio for a decade, I never liked using it.

The main reason was the 4 knob workflow was crap, and often confusing. I'd take the AxeIII's button+knob overload any day really.

But yeah... there aren't many rack units that give you what the AxeIII and Helix do. Closest I could think up would be a huge modular synth setup, which truly would fill a room and be so utterly cumbersome to use that it wouldn't even compare in terms of workflow.

Personally I feel the Axe-Fx IV as a rack unit should be just a I/O and DSP brain you use entirely with Axe-Edit and external knob controllers.

I don't think I'm on this page. Even when I'm jamming out just at home, I'm tweaking the occasional parameter on the Axe III hardware. It sits on top of my amp, and I just reach over and tweak the delay or reverb settings, or I go to the amp block and tweak some stuff there.

I will say that whenever I need to do something deep and involved, I use the software. But if I just need a bit more wetness or a bit more gain, I am fine using the hardware.

I've not tried setting any modifiers up on the hardware really. That is one area that is just waaaaay easier in the software. But again... my point was, the software is so good, it kinda makes the HW experience seem worse - imo.

If you didn't have Axe Edit at all, if it never existed, I think a lot of people would have a much different view on the HW editing experience.