Hi All,
I hope to find some help here! I have my Axe III + FC-6 for a week now. The multi IO presets are pretty clear to me, but I'm struggling with the independent control of the amp channels. The situation is as following:
We have a guy that plays electric guitar in only 5 or so songs and we do not want to bring an additional rig on stage (he has done so, but it's bullsh...). So I want him to play through my rig using input 2 and output 2. The chain is pretty simple, only Amp, Cab, Reverb and maybe compression and drive. He uses max. two sounds per song. He needs a clean and a rhythm channel, so I setup a second Amp block and assigned proper Amps for channel A and B. Then he only needs to switch between those channels. You can remote control the Amp channel via an external switch which is connected to the FC-6. This works without any problems, but when I change scenes, the channels in the second Amp block also change to what ever channel was selected before. I was hoping the channel feature would behave like the bypass state of blocks with scene revert off, but it doesn't. I don't know wether I'm doing something wrong or it's simply not possible to run two guitars with independent control for the amp channels? I have not yet tried Midi, as I do not have access to my Midi Controller. In general, I would expect this should be possible, because the manual describes such a scenario. Also, Cooper Carter shows this in his Axe III class. But none of them talks about controlling a multi IO preset.
Many Thanks!
Scenes change everything in a preset. this is the design. for "independent" control, you'll have to change individual blocks rather than using Scenes. here are some thoughts i had when i had 2 guitarists (3 guitars total) going through the Axe3 at a regular gig.
i recently did a weekly gig where my duo partner and i shared the Axe3 for both of our guitars. my setup uses a guitar with electric pickups and a piezo/acoustic sound. so technically we had 3 guitars running through it.
it "worked" but with planning. tone wise, sound wise, and all that, it was great.
the issue comes down to changing sounds, especially when it comes to Scenes. to make it easy for my partner i just gave her 3 Scenes, with a few IA switches for delay, chorus, and a boost (filter block). if i'm on a clean sound, and she's on a lead sound, if i change Scenes so that i'm on a lead sound, her sound will change because a Scene currently can't "ignore" blocks. if she turned on the Chorus block with the IA, and i changed sounds, her Chorus block would turn off. so in short, any Scene change that one guitar needs will affect the sound of the other one.
so i split the "scenes" into 2 groups of 4 - up to 4 for me, up to 4 for her.
the rule was whoever is singing the song, they stay on their "clean" sound only. this allowed me to do this:
if i sing:
S5 - my clean, her clean
S6 - my clean, her clean lead
S7 - my clean, her distortion
S8 - my clean, her distortion lead
if she sings:
S1 - my clean, her clean
S2 - my clean lead, her clean
S3 - my distortion, her clean
S4 - my distortion lead, her clean
so while i sang, she could change Scenes all she wanted, but my clean was unaffected because none of "my blocks" changed at all. no gap or anything while i played and she changed Scenes. same for when she sang.
under all of this was my piezo/acoustic tone, where the 3 blocks used there never, ever change, so personally, i always have a fall back to change to the acoustic sound using a switch on the guitar itself. it helps in this situation too, where just in case some Scene was changed wrong, i have some sort of guitar sound (acoustic).
it's this sort of consideration that needs to be made when using multiple guitars with one Axe.
it would be great if the "Scenes can ignore blocks" wish can be implemented in the future, or other similar things. i think many people can't afford an axe per player, so they don't buy any, and FAS gets 0 sales. but if features that helped us "share the axe" with multiple players, many bands would get at least one. (how's that for marketing
)
the situation i described is a bit improvisational - we don't plan songs or rehearse. we just play and adapt. that's why having the singer stick to the clean tone and the other player improvise works out.
with fully planned songs, setlists, and tones, this might be a non-issue since every change can be known at all times. but you can't stray from that probably, unless you setup like i did or something similar.
so it can work. but you need to plan.