ou guys crack me up. I make edits on the fly with the AxeFX II all the time. It's really not that hard! The screen and menu system is certainly not as convenient as it could be, but it's a piece of cake to make edits. Take the time to learn your gear.
Way to go. Assuming that this is because nobody learned to use the front panel. Yeah, I'm totally fluent with editing on the front panel and do the majority of my tweaking that way, and have for years. ABCD knobs just don't cut it, sorry. That's not the problem.
You see, I play mostly live, and many times in new rooms that are so kind as to NOT accommodate the bands with enough time to set up and do a proper sound check. (And some bandmates tend to be notoriously late getting set up.) So literally, I can be flying by the seat of my pants for the first few songs until the band's performance level and stage mix settles in. We all need to pay close attention, listen to ourselves and each other, and it just sort of happens...and unfortunately it NEEDS to happen this way, not by our choice (thankfully the $$$ is decent!). So, yeah, you can be damn sure that for the first 10-15 minutes of these type of gigs, easy, immediate access to certain parameters is a big frigging deal. Meantime, the guitarist on the other side of the stage just reaches over to his traditional amp, casually and quickly makes his adjustments and he's done. So yeah, that's the deal.
If I have a 2 bar break early in set one, I may need to tweak a couple global EQ settings, or a Global amp block's tone, or a reverb blend, or what have you. Doing this while making necessary Scene & preset changes makes it even more difficult. I know where everything is on the front panel of the AxeFx and how to use it. It's just not that easy to make critical tone/mix adjustments on the fly, within just a few seconds, trying to be inconspicuous, and the band isn't going to stop performing just so I can cut a problem bass frequency 4 db.
No sense in getting into this any further as it's been well-discussed on this forum long ago, but it was this type of ongoing REQUEST for a FAS solution that caused a forum member to fully develop and fabricate a 1 rack unit to solve the problem, and that many AxeFx owners have purchased.