Easiest way to pedal in gain (as needed)

Tplesko

Tplesko

Inspired
I’ve tried a few methods for this, but none are great - during a song where I am playing a clean or acoustic tone, I’d like to feather in some medium or even high gain now and then using an expression pedal. When I go down on the pedal the gain should increase and feather in and when I go heel down it should go back to the nice clean tone.

Any thoughts? My best idea so far has been to have a tube screamer or other with a pedal tied to Mix.

Any better ideas? As always appreciated the forum
 
I have not done this on the Axe FX yet, but the times I have done similar on other gear, I had better results using 2 amp lines. Amp A clean, Amp B dirty, and used the expression pedal to control the output of each. Toe down decrease A and increase B, and heel down increase A and decrease B.

It's not something I do or use a lot, but that was really effective for that.
 
I have a whole thread on using the input gain with an expression pedal. That was apparently frowned on with older units but the III seems to handle it just fine. How good it sounds depends on the model. I haven't tried finding a model that goes from crystal clean to dirty yet. I go from a good bit of gain to a lot more gain. :smilingimp: I can get it clean if I also use the volume control though.

Without having tried this yet, another thing you could try as a variation of the suggestion by Zilthy, put your clean and dirty amps in different columns and throw a mixer block in there and use the mixer controls with the expression pedal instead of the outputs. You could essentially sweep between completely different sounds this way if you want. I always felt like the middle positions would sound weird setup like this but it would be a smoother transition than a button even if you were doing a quick sweep between sounds and not using the in between areas much.

It sounds like you want to try something similar to what I'm doing. Your milage may vary but it's working fine for me. I haven't tried every model yet.

Here's the thread. You'll see there's varying opinions. I've been doing this for months without a single glitch.

https://forum.fractalaudio.com/threads/expression-pedal-to-control-gain.154177/
 
Other things I intend to mess around with at some point just to give you some ideas, control the gain on a drive pedal, turn on the boost in the preamp and control the boost level. There's a jump in volume with that one you may or may not want but you can always program a corresponding drop in level to balance it out.

Tons of options to experiment with. One of these days I'm just going to load one pedal with all kinds of parameter adjustments just to see if I can get it to say Uncle.
 
You can attach the expression pedal to the Drive parameter of whichever model you choose, toe down the maximum gain you want and vice-versa for heel down. If you have too much of a volume increase as the gain is added, you can attach the expression pedal to the modifier on the Level control of the Drive to reduce the Level as the gain is increased.
 
I just always use the volume pedal for this kind of stuff. If you don't want the signal to go completely quite when heel down just set the limits on the modifier appropriately.
 
I know @2112 Leon Todd also did this a while back on the Ax8 and even shared the preset. I'm sure it could be done on the Ax III in several different ways.
 
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