For gigging, unless the song requires specialist sounds I'm currently using a kitchen sink preset with scene ignore for amps and mixture of scene controllers, control switches, dual amp and drive blocks and multiplexer blocks to keep my scene changes seamless, so it will be nice to be able to do away with the blocks and modifiers I need to do that, which in turn will free up CPU, although I'm not sure that will be as much of a consideration anymore if 1 amp and 1 drive block is going to be enough?
I've never used song/setlists because I wanted to avoid gaps, so I'm also looking forward to experimenting with that. Having never tried it I don't know how well preset spillover works to keep changes with effects smooth? I guess it depends on how radical the audio changes are, but here's what I'm thinking:
Create a preset each for clean, edge of breakup, crunch and lead tones each with 8 scenes for the sounds/effect combos I'll mostly ever need. I'll then use songs/setlists to select the appropriate tones from those presets for each song and to switch between them at gigs. That way I only have to maintain 4 presets and can enjoy seamless switching between my favourite sounds in every song. If a particular song has specific effects/settings (like Livin On A Prayer with the talkbox) then I'll continue to have a song per preset for those songs, but in our current setlist of around 30 songs, I only need dedicate presets for a handful of them.
Of all the updates in the years I've been using Fractal products this is one of the ones I'm most excited to try and am really hoping it successfully makes it to the FM9 as I only recently sold my 3!