rodzimguitar68
Fractal Fanatic
I don't know how complex your rig is, but you can look at the midi implementation charts for every piece of gear you have in your rig, and put a mark beside each feature that can be controlled via CC commands, that is important to you, and something you would frequently want to be able to control with MIDI. Assign each piece of MIDI gear to a different MIDI channel. Enter the name of the gear next to its appropriate midi channel on the Global 1 tab of the Liquid Foot editor. Such as "Axe FX II - midi 1", "Strymon Timeline - midi 2", "GCX switcher - midi 16". Now when you place midi commands in the command lines of liquid foot presets, or songs, the name of the device will be in the drop down list, instead of sterile midi channel numbers.
Back to my opening sentence. Suppose you only have an Axe FX II. The midi implementation chart shows CC numbers, and scenes show a CC number and a value. Create IA slots for every CC that you want to frequently control. For ease of operation, you could simply stop at creating 8 IA slots - 1 for each scene, and be done. But of course, we want instant access within a scene of various effects, so you are probably going to create IA slots for each effect block, AND each X/Y state of each effect block too. For ease of logic, I placed my effect on/off IA and then its X/Y IA right after the effect. (IA Maps were not available when I programmed my device).
Okay, now you know which effects you want to be able to designate as on or off, and whether you're going to use its X or Y state (if it is available in the Axe).
Let's PRETEND you only want to control distortion, chorus, reverb, and delay and NOTHING ELSE. You would create an IA slot with the appropriate CC number and a 127 value for ON, and a 0 value for BYPASS.
You can create a Liquid foot pedal board (called a PAGE) and typically, you'll run things with a bottom row of presets, and the other buttons being Instant on/off's for your effects, plus other buttons for stuff like bank up/down, tuner, tap tempo, etc.
In our pretend world you only have 4 effects.
But what if you begin a song with 2 off and 2 on, but in the middle of the song, you want all 4 on, and then 2 measures later, all 4 off at the same time. You either need to grow more legs, OR, you need to create 3 liquid foot presets. Preset 1 is how the song begins with 2 effects on, preset 2 has all 4 on, and preset 3 has all 4 BYPASS (do not confuse OFF or Block, with BYPASS). On the liquid foot preset screen the little circles can be green to send the on message, and red to send bypass, they can remain gray to be in the OFF mode, which sends no message at all (think of OFF as "completely ignore like it's not even there, dude"). An example of when to leave your IA slot set to OFF, would, in our example be, in the case where you have an IA slot for Chorus, but in fact the Axe FX preset you created for the song, didn't use the Chorus effect block in the signal chain. It is pointless to make the Liquid Foot send a MIDI command for On or Bypass, when you did not include a Chorus effect block on the Axe. This is useful with complex systems with 60-180 slots - create presets that turn on the appropriate stuff, or that Bypass (turn off) the appropriate stuff. Use the OFF setting to ignore the non-essential IA slots in that preset.
When you have your 3 custom presets, you can access them by putting the pedal in preset mode. The page you created, that has 4 preset buttons along the bottom row, will only have the first 3 button lit, because right now, you are new, and only have created 3 presets - you don't have a 4th yet.
If you play in a band that has 20 songs, and you create sometimes 1 preset, 2 presets, 3 presets, 4,5,6,7,8 presets to get all the way through a song, you can create and name 20 song holders and then drop your presets that are relevant to that song, into the song. You can then enter your Program Change command in the song command lines, or you can choose to enter the Program Change command in the first preset of that song, so that your Axe FX will change to the proper preset whenever you want to play that song. You could then put your pedal into song mode, but actually it makes more sense to create a set list, and drop your 20 songs into the set list in the order you are planning to play them, and then put your pedal into set list mode, and choose the set list you just created for tonight's gig. Next time you power on your unit, it will be waiting for you at song one. If you turn on your rack FIRST, and THEN plug in your Liquid Foot, when it boots up, it will send the appropriate Program Change to your rig, to change everything to the patches you'll need for song 1 of the set. Once you become more comfortable you can do other things in your rig to make your life easier.
I made a dummy song called "END OF SET" and I made that song 1 in my system. I did this because whatever you create as song 1, gets populated in every slot of a set list. Set lists hold 60 songs, so if you created 20 songs, and put them into a set list, your set list would be those 20 songs, and 40 repeated occurances of song 1 in your system. Let's say, out of excitement, on day 1 you created a song FREEBIRD. And it's a valid song, with 4 presets - verse, chorus, bridge, solo. Now everytime you make a set list, you'll have 60 FREEBIRDS in the blank set, and the other songs occupying the first 20 slots. My "END OF SET" song is special, it uses a pedalboard page, that has nothing else on it, but a song down button. So if I reach the END OF SET song in a set list by using the song up button on the last song of my set, when the system scrolls to that fake END OF SET song, the only direction I can go is backwards, down through my set list again. Very useful if I'm using 20 songs, song 21 is that fake END OF SET song (and so are slots 22-60 since END OF SET is song 1 in my system), so when I reach that song, I can only go back down. I can't accidentally scroll up through 10 END OF SET songs, and be on song 30 by mistake.
Back to my opening sentence. Suppose you only have an Axe FX II. The midi implementation chart shows CC numbers, and scenes show a CC number and a value. Create IA slots for every CC that you want to frequently control. For ease of operation, you could simply stop at creating 8 IA slots - 1 for each scene, and be done. But of course, we want instant access within a scene of various effects, so you are probably going to create IA slots for each effect block, AND each X/Y state of each effect block too. For ease of logic, I placed my effect on/off IA and then its X/Y IA right after the effect. (IA Maps were not available when I programmed my device).
Okay, now you know which effects you want to be able to designate as on or off, and whether you're going to use its X or Y state (if it is available in the Axe).
Let's PRETEND you only want to control distortion, chorus, reverb, and delay and NOTHING ELSE. You would create an IA slot with the appropriate CC number and a 127 value for ON, and a 0 value for BYPASS.
You can create a Liquid foot pedal board (called a PAGE) and typically, you'll run things with a bottom row of presets, and the other buttons being Instant on/off's for your effects, plus other buttons for stuff like bank up/down, tuner, tap tempo, etc.
In our pretend world you only have 4 effects.
But what if you begin a song with 2 off and 2 on, but in the middle of the song, you want all 4 on, and then 2 measures later, all 4 off at the same time. You either need to grow more legs, OR, you need to create 3 liquid foot presets. Preset 1 is how the song begins with 2 effects on, preset 2 has all 4 on, and preset 3 has all 4 BYPASS (do not confuse OFF or Block, with BYPASS). On the liquid foot preset screen the little circles can be green to send the on message, and red to send bypass, they can remain gray to be in the OFF mode, which sends no message at all (think of OFF as "completely ignore like it's not even there, dude"). An example of when to leave your IA slot set to OFF, would, in our example be, in the case where you have an IA slot for Chorus, but in fact the Axe FX preset you created for the song, didn't use the Chorus effect block in the signal chain. It is pointless to make the Liquid Foot send a MIDI command for On or Bypass, when you did not include a Chorus effect block on the Axe. This is useful with complex systems with 60-180 slots - create presets that turn on the appropriate stuff, or that Bypass (turn off) the appropriate stuff. Use the OFF setting to ignore the non-essential IA slots in that preset.
When you have your 3 custom presets, you can access them by putting the pedal in preset mode. The page you created, that has 4 preset buttons along the bottom row, will only have the first 3 button lit, because right now, you are new, and only have created 3 presets - you don't have a 4th yet.
If you play in a band that has 20 songs, and you create sometimes 1 preset, 2 presets, 3 presets, 4,5,6,7,8 presets to get all the way through a song, you can create and name 20 song holders and then drop your presets that are relevant to that song, into the song. You can then enter your Program Change command in the song command lines, or you can choose to enter the Program Change command in the first preset of that song, so that your Axe FX will change to the proper preset whenever you want to play that song. You could then put your pedal into song mode, but actually it makes more sense to create a set list, and drop your 20 songs into the set list in the order you are planning to play them, and then put your pedal into set list mode, and choose the set list you just created for tonight's gig. Next time you power on your unit, it will be waiting for you at song one. If you turn on your rack FIRST, and THEN plug in your Liquid Foot, when it boots up, it will send the appropriate Program Change to your rig, to change everything to the patches you'll need for song 1 of the set. Once you become more comfortable you can do other things in your rig to make your life easier.
I made a dummy song called "END OF SET" and I made that song 1 in my system. I did this because whatever you create as song 1, gets populated in every slot of a set list. Set lists hold 60 songs, so if you created 20 songs, and put them into a set list, your set list would be those 20 songs, and 40 repeated occurances of song 1 in your system. Let's say, out of excitement, on day 1 you created a song FREEBIRD. And it's a valid song, with 4 presets - verse, chorus, bridge, solo. Now everytime you make a set list, you'll have 60 FREEBIRDS in the blank set, and the other songs occupying the first 20 slots. My "END OF SET" song is special, it uses a pedalboard page, that has nothing else on it, but a song down button. So if I reach the END OF SET song in a set list by using the song up button on the last song of my set, when the system scrolls to that fake END OF SET song, the only direction I can go is backwards, down through my set list again. Very useful if I'm using 20 songs, song 21 is that fake END OF SET song (and so are slots 22-60 since END OF SET is song 1 in my system), so when I reach that song, I can only go back down. I can't accidentally scroll up through 10 END OF SET songs, and be on song 30 by mistake.
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