Fractal Talk

Whizzinby said:
What am I looking at? lol You reorg’ed them?
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It’s Austin Buddy’s Live Gold pack that I’ve blabbed about repeatedly. Takes all the amps and organizes them like that, while pairing them with an appropriate cab, some basic effects and al the routing to go direct or into a power amp + cab. The organizational aspect alone is worth the cost alone, IMO.
 
DrewJD82 said:
It’s Austin Buddy’s Live Gold pack that I’ve blabbed about repeatedly. Takes all the amps and organizes them like that, while pairing them with an appropriate cab, some basic effects and al the routing to go direct or into a power amp + cab. The organizational aspect alone is worth the cost alone, IMO.
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Those are presets right?
 
DrewJD82 said:
It’s Austin Buddy’s Live Gold pack that I’ve blabbed about repeatedly. Takes all the amps and organizes them like that, while pairing them with an appropriate cab, some basic effects and al the routing to go direct or into a power amp + cab. The organizational aspect alone is worth the cost alone, IMO.
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Super clean!

Sorting options certainly wouldn't be amiss. I'm sure we'll see sortable tags eventually. Not sure which Gen, though.
 
JiveTurkey said:
TBF; I didn't ride a bike to my gig though :unsure::ROFLMAO:
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2991247423_2cd01f97f8_z.jpg
 
Orvillain said:
Yeah I'm also not entire sold on using a rack unit for live. It sounds silly, but we play quite small venues most of the time. People stack up amps on top of 4x12's, push them right to the back of the stage, and call it done. So getting to the rear of an Axe FX III to plug stuff in during setup and teardown, and having to deal with a ton of valve amps potentially sitting on top of it... just pragmatic things like that make me think an FM9 would be easier to deal with.
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Fwiw, I have been dealing with considerably large setups for the most part of my "career". Like at least a 2x12 and top. often a rack inbetween and some (occasionally cruise ship sized) pedalboard. It's never been a real issue in itself.
It's just that not having to deal with that anymore opened up for some options, usually results in an overall better sound (at least IMO, YMMofcourseV) and is a lot more comfortable to deal with.
I don't have to deal with rental amps or cabs anymore. And if I have, it's gonna be more or less neutral FR stuff that my setup is based around anyway.
Loading is a piece of cake.
Mobility is greatly enhanced (and I simply love being as car-less as possible).
Stage sound is vastly improved not only because of FR monitoring but also because I can pretty much freely chose my stage location rather than being limited by whatever cabs.
I can instantly switch to IEM.

Now, all this doesn't have to do much (if anything) with the Axe FX being a rack device, but in retrospective, on pretty much all of my last gigs having to place a rack somewhere would've been annoying. Let alone the two last ones were gigs where I traveled by train, which I absolutely love.

Ok, back to genuine FAS stuff...

laxu said:
You can assign up to 16 external controllers.
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Uh, that's not a lot. Is there any reason for such a limitation? Are they kinda reseved for other things internally (quite a common thing for most MIDI devices, just not that much...).

laxu said:
I assume your needs are mostly to have global blocks for the amp.
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Yeah well, in my fantasy I already had already been wishing for more than the 32 encoders the BCR has on offer. And in my Helix test setup they were all assigned, too - without things feeling like overkill at all. I mean, 5-7 controls per each amp, 3 per global drive, 3-5 per global delay/verb, lead EQ mids and leve, etc., that stuff is adding up quickly.
But of course, as long as plain utility stuff is concerned, 16 should be fine. I usually don't even need to fool around with all amp controls, gain, level and treble most often do the job, for reverb/delay just mix do the trick, etc. Still, that's quite a strange limitation.

laxu said:
But the real shitty way the modifier system works on Fractal is that the modifier becomes the single source of truth and nothing but the connected controller can adjust the params attached to modifiers. There is no good technical reason for this, the system can easily handle "last value in = current value", whether that value comes from Axe-Edit, front panel or your controller.
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Oh wow. I didn't expect something like that on an otherwise generally most excellent unit. That's really reading more like a "yeah, we added MIDI CC control as an afterthought" kinda thing.

And from your earlier post:

laxu said:
A big part of why I'm championing for far better onboard control on modelers is that the typical situation is that you want to tweak a bit no matter what - maybe to accommodate your guitar, maybe to accommodate how you hear things today, maybe to fit the sound to a specific space, a different output system etc. Being able to do that super easily matters.
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Every bit this. And possibly add to this that you may as well want plenty of onboard or external controllers so you can very quickly edit multiple things sort of parallely. Drive pedals and amps are sooo much interacting it makes an incredible lot of sense to be able to have their controls next to each other without having to select them every time (let alone reach for any sort of menu). That's one of the key aspects of why I'm loving my hybrid pedalboard so much. Even the amp controls (which would be located somewhere else in the old days) are now next to my compressors, drives and EQs. Just excellent. Same goes for reverbs and delays. I often use both in combination and especially their mix parameters interact (or interfere, if you will...) a lot.

-----

I actually think that now that most of the sonic (well, at least a whole lot of important ones) are nailed, it's pretty much about time to think about all these kinda usability aspects.
Personally, what I'd like to see is a modeler allowing me to pretty much 1:1 replicate a loopswitcher + MIDI based hybrid setup. And while some aspects are possibly doable on one or the other platform, none of them really does it.
As a simple example: I have an MS-50G sitting in one of my loops. It's active on two patches and per gig I usually cycle through 2-4 MS-50 patches. Note: pretty much all of the patches are using more than just a single FX block. In case it'd just be a single block, it could perhaps be mimicked somehow. But the way I have those patches set up? No cigar.

Well, maybe one day. Likely when my fingers are already a victim of arthrosis.
 
aerial7 said:
I think that's upside-down;
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No. It's just two entirely different things. Both of which matter. More to some, less to others.

Ease of use is a BIG advantage in some situations, sometimes even crucial to get things done in time and properly. In case you're never running into any such situations, more power to you. But I do.
 
aerial7 said:
One of those is the best piece of gear I've ever owned -- and somehow gets better every year.

The other is a Line 6 product that finally taught me: I just don't like the way their stuff works.
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I can literally state my thoughts by replacing Line 6 with FAS in the above!

Horses for courses! ;)
 
gdhi11 said:
Honestly, would like to have both, but I'm not convinced you can have a great UI with the level of control needed.
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I insist on having both, and I'm absolutely convinced it's possible. We can already see all of the elements needed in existing products. It's just a matter of cherry picking from the best, streamlining any redundancies, fastidiously organizing whatever settings remain, and then presenting them with a functional UI (QC would be a good baseline IMO) that extends further across optional screens (e.g. for deep editing parameters a la FAS) as needed.

Seriously, roll in a whiteboard and I'll bang this out in an afternoon.
 
mbenigni said:
I insist on having both, and I'm absolutely convinced it's possible.
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This.
I'm not familiar with the FAS UI given any firsthand experience (when I had an Axe FX borrowed I only ever used the editor), but reading about it, it's pretty clear that there's room for a lot of improvements without sacrificing any functionality. And talking about functionality, considering what @laxu just said about MIDI CC implementation, there seems to be plenty of room for improvements, too.

I already mentioned that elsewhere, complexed devices of that kind should always offer "easy" modes, too. Native Instruments' FM8 has that covered extremely well, and while that very approach defenitely couldn't be adapted to the FAS ecosystem, there's possibly a lot of other ways to skin that cat. As in a) offering more intuitive editing and b) allowing for things such as macro controllers and easily to navigate performance pages, ideally along with as easy external controller support.
 
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