New Fractal speculation thread

DLC86

DLC86

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In the last few days I was feeling a void in my soul but couldn't explain why. Then I realized it was due to the departure of our dear old Fractal speculation thread.
It was a good friend that made our days better, but sadly it's not among us anymore.

But just like when your loved pet dies and you swear you'll never get another one, then some time passes and you fall in love again with a fuzzy animated ball...
Here's your new puppy babe!

Immagine 2024-10-23 100404.png


At first it will look like a stranger, it won't be the same as the old one, but with time you'll learn to love it, just take care of it!
Speculate folks!
 
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Drives only box.

It's something Cliff wished to do years ago (let's say 5 to 10 years ago?).

Maybe a kind of Drive Designer concept on top of it could be cool, as he seemed to be (rightly) mocking how most drives are just slight variations on a few main designs. So the advanced page could have extra parameters (like we have for amps in the Axe-Fx) where you can dial in "anything you've ever heard"...

The problem is... if people want to stack two or three drives, you're almost back to the VP4 and it might be hard to make a more affordable pedal.
 
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He said products (plural), so one could be it or maybe a smaller pedal that does just 1 or 2 blocks ala Hx One. Another one could be an amp/cab pedal since that seems to be the shit these days.
 
He also had an idea for a physical feedback creator/enhancer device (and many other ideas, but no time...).
Sounded like something that would be connected to or close to the guitar.

But this would benefit every player who likes to have that, so less applicable to his quote.
 
Or, as someone was guessing on the FAS forum not long ago:

A FAS-quality amp profiler
Meaning, it doesn't use tone match bits and adjusting some generic amp code, but matches the source to the closest actual amp model from many built-in, then adjusts its knobs/parameters to sound close enough. Big advantage being that it leaves you with a fully realistically adjustable Axe-Fx like model.
Click to expand...

If not, you might include that in the next Gen... ;) (You could sell it as "AI" to make a few people happy.)
 
FracKing said:
Drives only box.

It's something Cliff wished to do years ago (let's say 5 to 10 years ago?).

Maybe a kind of Drive Designer concept on top of it could be cool, as he seemed to be (rightly) mocking how most drives are just slight variations on a few main designs. So the advanced page could have extra parameters (like we have for amps in the Axe-Fx) where you can dial in "anything you've ever heard"...

The problem is... if people want to stack two or three drives, you're almost back to the VP4 and it might be hard to make a more affordable pedal.
Click to expand...
VP4 does have the advanced drive parameters available in the "expert mode", so you could think of it as a "drive designer" already in a way.

One of the reasons why I just use the Strymon Riverside as my only drive pedal is because I found that with some control adjustments I got it sounding pretty similar to e.g a TS, Bluesbreaker, ODR-1 etc. Stacking is of no interest to me when I could just set the Riverside for higher gain and tweak the EQ. So it felt silly to have more drives than that. Fuzz etc are a separate matter.
 
I think Fractal sees that there's a lot of money on the pedal market, and those are not the people who will buy a FM3 or FM9 no matter what.

To me an obvious product would be a combined delay/reverb pedal. The best option on the market is still the SA Collider, with truly nothing that can challenge its feature set, or even sounds. Maybe Fractal could do a "VP2" that is around the size of an Eventide H9?

Fractal probably also sees that e.g the Tonex One is making high quality amp sims a commodity, even if captures suck compared to amp models that sound and function like the real deal. Meanwhile UA's "spam the market with different single amp sims" approach seems to be working well.

That means that there's less people potentially interested in buying a FM3 at $1000 compared to buying pedals at $200-400 every now and then. At least I think most people looking to buy a FM3 are primarily buying it for the amp/cab sims, and only find out how good the effects are after getting it.

Fractal could go for those markets by releasing a compact amp/cab sim pedal, with maybe some easy to use "capture-like" feature to fit one of the models to match your real amp. Since Tone Match is only available on the Axe-Fx 3, and it's pretty "techy" to use, that won't gain any real traction. Replacing it with a machine-learning based model trained on Fractal's own amp models and real amps could potentially work. Maybe the processing could be done on a computer inside an Axe-Edit style software, using the pedal only as the audio interface and finally uploading the model back to the unit.
 
laxu said:
To me an obvious product would be a combined delay/reverb pedal. The best option on the market is still the SA Collider, with truly nothing that can challenge its feature set, or even sounds. Maybe Fractal could do a "VP2" that is around the size of an Eventide H9?
Click to expand...
The VP4 sort of covers that already though. A VP1 or VP2 not limited to just delay/reverb seems more likely imho.

laxu said:
Fractal probably also sees that e.g the Tonex One is making high quality amp sims a commodity, even if captures suck compared to amp models that sound and function like the real deal. Meanwhile UA's "spam the market with different single amp sims" approach seems to be working well.

That means that there's less people potentially interested in buying a FM3 at $1000 compared to buying pedals at $200-400 every now and then. At least I think most people looking to buy a FM3 are primarily buying it for the amp/cab sims, and only find out how good the effects are after getting it.

Fractal could go for those markets by releasing a compact amp/cab sim pedal, with maybe some easy to use "capture-like" feature to fit one of the models to match your real amp. Since Tone Match is only available on the Axe-Fx 3, and it's pretty "techy" to use, that won't gain any real traction. Replacing it with a machine-learning based model trained on Fractal's own amp models and real amps could potentially work. Maybe the processing could be done on a computer inside an Axe-Edit style software, using the pedal only as the audio interface and finally uploading the model back to the unit.
Click to expand...
A couple months ago I was pretty sure what turned out to be the VP4 was actually going to be an amp/cab pedal, so that probably remains the most likely option. Otoh the market is flooded by this type of products at this point, so it will be quite hard to compete there (even though Fractal still has the best amp sims imho), so I don't know...
Regarding amp capture, if it ever comes to Fractal-land I think we'll see that on a flagship unit first rather than on a "cheap" pedal.
 
VP4 "soon" equaled about ~4 <-> ~6 weeks

More products "in the pipe" has got to be at least ~9 <-> ~12 months away
 
DLC86 said:
The VP4 sort of covers that already though. A VP1 or VP2 not limited to just delay/reverb seems more likely imho.
Click to expand...
VP4 is still pretty big. Not big in terms of a full board, but big compared to most individual pedals. I've been using Pedalplayground to see how I'd work the VP4 on my Nux Bumblebee M, and it's honestly not a great fit on it due to its depth, while in terms of width it takes about 2.5 Strymon pedals worth of space. I still see it more like a replacement for an entire board.

DLC86 said:
A couple months ago I was pretty sure what turned out to be the VP4 was actually going to be an amp/cab pedal, so that probably remains the most likely option. Otoh the market is flooded by this type of products at this point, so it will be quite hard to compete there (even though Fractal still has the best amp sims imho), so I don't know...
Regarding amp capture, if it ever comes to Fractal-land I think we'll see that on a flagship unit first rather than on a "cheap" pedal.
Click to expand...
While Fractal's 300+ amp models are certainly more than enough for anyone, some people will be enticed by capture type features so I could see it potentially being a selling point even on a cheaper pedal. But you are right that they might want to hold something like that for the next gen big boy boxes.
 
I’ve said it before, but if FAS put out individual pedals that only had 1 effects block in them between $200-$300, I’d end up with almost all of them.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see an amp/cab version of the VP4 as well.
 
An AC4 (amp cab pedal) would be really great.

Especially if it has the power of the vp4.
That means 2 amps and 4 cab blocks (with 2 fullres) and the secret input sauce.

Basically the axe3 amp and cab in a pedal
 
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