Does Fractal Have TOO MANY Options?

DXMG503

DXMG503

Inspired
As a simple amp and cab user, I would watch friends who owned a Fractal product and be really turned off by it. I thought there were way to many options. What the heck is an impedance curve?

I didn’t think Fractal was for me. Boy, was I was wrong.

The cost and logistics of having a full set of gear, and apartment living, forced me to try my first Fractal product, the FM3, and then quickly upgrade to the FM9. The learning curve has been steep, but the factory defaults and realistic control views that are tailored to match the real front panel on each amp made it very easy to get started. I almost immediately felt at home.

It doesn’t stop there though. I quickly wanted to go further, and there’s no way I would have ever learned any of the more complex ins and outs of guitar gear and audio if I wasn’t forced to by this amazing piece of gear. Thankfully, folks like Leon Todd and Cooper Carter on YouTube made it very easy to learn everything quickly, and have fun doing it.

Just one year later, I’ve become a better player and mixer using the FM9. Playing is way more enjoyable.

I love the FM9.
 
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Tweak the factory presets a little to get started and stop there. No need to go deeper.. until you are inspired to do so.

Just because a knob exists doesn't mean you have to turn it. Similarly with the number of amp models. Once you find a couple you like you can just use them and forget about the rest.
 
Just got my first FAS gear, the FM9 Turbo last week. Took me very very very little time to get usable tones, and doing a couple basic tweaks was utterly simple.

For me, I'm glad all the options are there for when I may need them. But I'm sure plenty of people never need to touch them.
 
I get where people are coming from, but it’s not like people don’t have drawers full of pedals, swap speakers and tubes, use a bunch of different mics etc in hardware land

The OCD tinkering with tone still happens no matter a modeler or not, it’s about the user mindset, not the specific gear

Modeler is just cheaper and easier than opening up the amp and heating up the soldering iron. Safer too lol
 
lqdsnddist said:
I get where people are coming from, but it’s not like people don’t have drawers full of pedals, swap speakers and tubes, use a bunch of different mics etc in hardware land

The OCD tinkering with tone still happens no matter a modeler or not, it’s about the user mindset, not the specific gear

Modeler is just cheaper and easier than opening up the amp and heating up the soldering iron. Safer too lol
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Not to mention all the amps , pedals and effects that are already in there!
Don't have to find them in the real world, buy them, mount them on your pedal board, wire them in, return them, argue with yourself whether it's worth the money, yadda.
 
Well a lot of the deep parameters are very subtle. Some give you a volume bump which can be perceived as better but it might not actually be better. And some of them are clearly audible and some are purely feel. There are a handful of these I set a certain way because to me they put a polish on the model. I like having them there. Cliff wanted them on there. It’s part of what puts FAS on top of the modeling food chain. So the answer is NO there are not too many options. It’s easy enough to ignore this stuff and you don’t need advanced parameters to get killer tones.
 
DXMG503 said:
As a simple amp and cab user, I would watch friends who owned a Fractal product and be really turned off by it. I thought there were way to many options. What the heck is an impedance curve?

I didn’t thin Fractal was for me. Boy, was I was wrong.

The cost and logistics of having a full set of gear, and apartment living, forced me to try my first Fractal product, the FM3, and then quickly upgrade to the FM9. The learning curve has been steep, but the factory defaults and realistic control views that are tailored to match the real front panel on each amp made it very easy to get started. I almost immediately felt at home.

It doesn’t stop there though. I quickly wanted to go further, and there’s no way I would have ever learned any of the more complex ins and outs of guitar gear and audio if I wasn’t forced to by this amazing piece of gear. Thankfully, folks like Leon Todd and Cooper Carter on YouTube made it very easy to learn everything quickly, and have fun doing it.

Just one year later, I’ve become a better player and mixer using the FM9. Playing is way more enjoyable.

I love the FM9.
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While I was never "turned off" by the range of options provided by a Fractal product, like you I warmed up to exploring further and digging deeper into the various options and I still have barely scratched the surface.

In terms of digging deeper I have focused on the amp and cabinet blocks and left most other blocks (e.g. reverb, delay, tremolo) at stock settings (just picked a plate reverb and analog delay). It would have been overwhelming to dig into deep settings on all blocks at once. Over time I am sure I will dig into others, but for now I still have plenty to discover in the amp and cabinet blocks and for the sounds that I am after I feel they are the most important.

I agree with you that there are probably MANY who are initially turned off by Fractal products because they feel having so many parameters to tweak is just too much for them and a waste of time. Like you, they might well warm up to the advantages of it if they ever did decide to take the plunge.

For me, the idea of being able to try different amps and cabinets/speakers was a huge draw to the Fractal products. Doing that in the traditional world (buying and selling many different amps and pedals) to hopefully settle on something I was completely happy with was not at all appealing. I had a JCM 800 for many years and was convinced it was NOT the amp for me, but I was very uncertain where to go from there. With Fractal I have settled on a few amps for each of my guitars none of which are the Princeton which is what I was considering buying first before deciding on Fractal.
 
It's great to have all the options, but like others have said, you don't need to dive into the deep parameters to get great tones - I've had my best success when just dialing things in like I would with a normal amp, using only the controls I would have access to on a 'real' amp.

I've had more than a few people ask me about modeling gear as they think about switching, and the perceived complexity of it is off-putting to many of them, but it's only as complicated as you want it to be, past a bit of a learning curve that I think is pretty manageable.
Personally on the latest gen I found the routing/switching stuff more of a mind-melter more than the amp-model tweaking, but again, just because they added SO much flexibility to it.

I think it's natural human psychology that if we have all these options we tend to feel like we're not getting all the value out of something if we don't use most of them, but man, the AX8 was my main rig for years, and I used maybe three or four amp models that entire time for live shows! Now with the FM9 I'm stretching out a bit more, especially as I'm using it for recording, but In my lifetime I'm not sure I'll have the chance to use 75% of the amp models to any significant degree, and that's fine!

All that said, it is fun to tweak in the deeper parameters sometimes ;)
 
Option paralysis is definitely a thing, but if you just stick to the first page of the amp controls it makes it pretty easy to get good tone. I got my buddy to buy an fm9 and switch from a helix and with no prior experience he said “I was able to get a better tone in 5 minutes than I’ve ever been able to get with the helix”.
 
While the world searches for answers to questions much more important, we ask, why are there so many choices? Do people really have any common sense? Because humans are able to create a vast amount of variety does not mean we should stop creating variety.
 
Dave Merrill said:
Not to mention all the amps , pedals and effects that are already in there!
Don't have to find them in the real world, buy them, mount them on your pedal board, wire them in, return them, argue with yourself whether it's worth the money, yadda.
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That is part of the fun though lol

Knowing a new pedal with some unobtainable transistor in will be in your mailbox tomorrow and you can come home and check it out just has a bit more excitement than knowing I can come home tomorrow, power up the Axe3 and spin a knob to a new transistor or diode type, know what I mean ?

In both cases probably isn’t going to sound they different either lol

Something to be said for tangible stuff, who built it, how did you come across it, who owned it previously, etc etc.

It’s like guitars, sure you could probably replace a bunch with some pickup/guitar modeling tech, but maybe more fun actually having a few different unique guitars ?
 
I'm in the "no" camp as well. I don't know much about programming or amp circuitry but have always been one to experiment with different preamp and power tubes, different bias settings and swapping out speakers. I also dove into the world of pedal building and have a few overdrives and fuzzes that have been tweaked to sound the way I prefer.

Having access to the different parameters, especially in the amp block, has provided the same rewarding experience of rolling tubes and added the satisfaction of 'modding' an amp to get the tones I associate with each particular amp. I primarily live in the Ideal page and some amps haven't 'needed' any tweaking beyond this page but I have found a few key parameters that provide me with what I want to hear and feel.

Any idea that one needs to dive into the advance parameters to get the most out of a Fractal device is self-imposed.
 
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