Hey folks, hope you don’t mind me sharing my experience with the AX8, having come from the Ultra and then the AxeFX II.
Firstly, the important thing is that the OP has a right to be disappointed if it doesn’t do what he needed of it. He bought it, it wasn’t for him, he’d be insane if he were happy about this! However, you need to go into the AX8 with your eyes open and very much understand it is not its bigger brother, as many have already stated.
For me, it has taken very little effort to build exactly what I need from a preset perspective, even though I’ve had to ditch my previous approach with the Axe II, where I was using 2 instances of pitch and amps in my presets. I can live without them and am doing just as well with scenes and X/Y to achieve pretty much the same thing.
With everything I ever use in a preset laid out, including 2 delays (4 variations using X/Y), clean and dirty sounds (Amp X/Y), 2 drive variations (X/Y), phaser, 2 filters, Wah and pitch, I’m at 85% cpu, which is spot on.
This allows me to have, in one preset:
1. Perfect clean tone
2. Clean tone with ambience
3. Edgy tone, dry
4. Edgy tone with ambience
5. Crunchy tone, dry
6. Crunchy tone with ambience
7. Crunchy tone, regular
8. Lead / Solo tone
This probably covers 98% of what I need for a gig from one preset, and I can easily build a couple more with specific things in them, for songs that require them. Sure, I’ve had to rethink a couple of things, but I went into it knowing I would have to and that my ‘all in one’ presets from the II were overkill before because, well, they COULD be
With all said and done, if you
need it to do more, then you
need an Axe FX.
Having some stuff missing from the AxeFX, like the preamps in the cab block or dephase has meant it’s taken longer to tweak back to what I like, but the end result is a better sounding preset than I’ve ever had before, because I’ve had to work at it a little. Not much, but definitely a little. Basically, there’s a way to achieve the same as the bigger unit, but just in a different way. Sounds better to me now than my Quantum 2 preset sounded on my AxeII – so that’s encouraging while waiting for the new FW!
Peace