Couple of questions from a new owner

[markyd]

Hello all,
Brand new Ultra owner here, and like most of you, I am now going to sell off most of my other gear! Anyway I have a couple of questions:

1) How do I make an automatic cross fade/morph? What I want to do is hit a footswitch and have long delays slowly fade out, or hit a footswitch and slowly morph between two different tones. The only way I can find to do this is with the damping paramater in the modifiers, but it only goes up to 1 second. I would really like a crossfade of about 8-9 seconds. Is there another way to do this?

2) What EXACTLY is a "tone stack?" The manual seems to indicate that it has to do with the way the tone controls work. (ie: the amount of boost/cut that the tone controls can have) Does it have anything to do with the distortion or other things, or is it just about the tone controls?

Thanks!

 

[FreaqyFrequency]

Hey Mark,

Sadly, since I don't yet own an Axe myself, I can't answer the first question, but...

A tone stack is a factory-installed passive EQ section. Usually, tweaking one knob such as the bass knob will also affect other frequencies to a certain extent, in accordance to the severity of the one knob's tweak. Many of the vintage amps modeled in the Axe lack a mid knob, because the bass and treble knobs were meant to shape the midrange response in the original amps. So, basically, they act as factory-set EQ curves.

Hope that helps.

 

[Bakerman]

Hello all,
1) How do I make an automatic cross fade/morph? What I want to do is hit a footswitch and have long delays slowly fade out, or hit a footswitch and slowly morph between two different tones. The only way I can find to do this is with the damping paramater in the modifiers, but it only goes up to 1 second. I would really like a crossfade of about 8-9 seconds. Is there another way to do this?

If you only need to crossfade from sound A to B (not back again within the same preset) and don't mind hitting a second switch after those 8-9 seconds it can be done by triggering the sequencer. An LFO could probably be used too. Otherwise you'd pretty much have to do it manually with a pedal or find a controller that can send a gradual string of CC values.

With the sequencer you can set it to something like 16 steps, rate just over 1 Hz, values increasing in steps of 10% and have it sit at 100% for the last 6 steps. Place a volume block in each signal chain and assign seq to turn chain B up and chain A down; use 1000 ms damping. Assign one switch to sequencer run control and a second switch to bypass both volume blocks. You'll want them engaged before/during the crossfade. Use mute bypass mode for the vol. block in chain A, thru bypass mode for the one in chain B. Now you can be playing sound A, hit switch 1 and get the 8-9 second crossfade, then hit switch 2 within the next 4-5 seconds before the sequencer restarts. If you wait too long you'll hear it fade back quickly to A (then B gradually again) but whenever you hit it you'll hear sound B regardless of what the sequencer's doing. After that you can always stop the sequencer and switch back to sound A; it will just be instant instead of a crossfade.