You can engage/bypass the effects with the onboard buttons. Unfortunately - and this is a major oversight - the only expression or MIDI control is of volume, gain and tone. No effect parameter can be controlled with MIDI CC. I own the Nano and this is big on my wish list for any future update. Of course patch changes can be made with MIDI program change commands - which would be made much simpler with a PC app where you could drag and drop to change the order of your patches.