TheloniusJ
Experienced
Just wanted to share my experience of going from receiving my FM3 to playing a live rehearsal with it in about 4 hours (a bunch of which I was still working and I had to run one errand on the way to rehearsal, so wasn't focused on the FM3). Overall the experience was awesome, but stressful. If anyone reads this, I have a few snags I ran into which I could use some help on.
I got my FM3 at about 2pm yesterday. I have rehearsal with the funk/jazz quartet I play with at 6pm and was originally planning on doing one last rehearsal with my Elevenrack rig, especially since I was still working (or maybe I should say "working"). However, after firing it up and doing the requisite 30ish minutes poking around with the presets (which I was truly blown away by), I decided to give it a shot and play live with it. Most of what we were going to be working on that night I figured I could get through with the ODS-100 preset patch (we were actually going to be working on a Ford/Colaiuta/Haslip song called "Man In The Ring" which is classic Ford tone).
While on the waitlist, I had gone through the user manual, though not really studied it. I had also watched a handful of YouTube videos and perused the posts on this forum which proved to be helpful.
The first snag I ran into was that I couldn't get FM3 Edit to work (see below), so I had to do all my tweaks using the unit, which I knew I could do. After a bit of referencing the manual and messing a couple of things up, I managed to copy the ODS patch to a blank patch and start tweaking it. For some reason, I couldn't turn the bypass off for the wah block so actually shunted that block and turned the compressor block into a wah block (since I thought I'd be OK with out the compressor).
I mounted up one of my Boss EV-5s and Mosky switch to an old pedalboard I have and decided I'd just sit the FM3 on the board while playing since I didn't have time to properly mount it. I managed to set the EV-5 up as a modifier for the wah, and even figured out how to set it up as auto-engage (which is freaking awesome). I also set the Mosky up as a stand-in switch with one button as tap tempo and the other as tuner (I'll probably tweak that later). I set my Whammy pedal and a passive volume pedal up before the FM3, and deemed I could survive rehearsal with it. Ultimately, I'd like to off-load my Whammy stuff to the FM3, but didn't have time.
Anyway, after some tweaking after getting to rehearsal, we went at it and the FM3 was REALLY incredible. Since I trying to just stick with the four scenes in the ODS patch, I couldn't do everything I wanted, but it was super do-able. I was incredibly impressed with how useable and GREAT SOUNDING the FM3 was.
My Temp Rig (we go direct using in-ears)
Here are a couple of impressions/observations from this crash course experience:
Thanks in advance for any help. And HUGE thanks to Fractal for building such a phenomenal piece of gear. I'm a convert.
I got my FM3 at about 2pm yesterday. I have rehearsal with the funk/jazz quartet I play with at 6pm and was originally planning on doing one last rehearsal with my Elevenrack rig, especially since I was still working (or maybe I should say "working"). However, after firing it up and doing the requisite 30ish minutes poking around with the presets (which I was truly blown away by), I decided to give it a shot and play live with it. Most of what we were going to be working on that night I figured I could get through with the ODS-100 preset patch (we were actually going to be working on a Ford/Colaiuta/Haslip song called "Man In The Ring" which is classic Ford tone).
While on the waitlist, I had gone through the user manual, though not really studied it. I had also watched a handful of YouTube videos and perused the posts on this forum which proved to be helpful.
The first snag I ran into was that I couldn't get FM3 Edit to work (see below), so I had to do all my tweaks using the unit, which I knew I could do. After a bit of referencing the manual and messing a couple of things up, I managed to copy the ODS patch to a blank patch and start tweaking it. For some reason, I couldn't turn the bypass off for the wah block so actually shunted that block and turned the compressor block into a wah block (since I thought I'd be OK with out the compressor).
I mounted up one of my Boss EV-5s and Mosky switch to an old pedalboard I have and decided I'd just sit the FM3 on the board while playing since I didn't have time to properly mount it. I managed to set the EV-5 up as a modifier for the wah, and even figured out how to set it up as auto-engage (which is freaking awesome). I also set the Mosky up as a stand-in switch with one button as tap tempo and the other as tuner (I'll probably tweak that later). I set my Whammy pedal and a passive volume pedal up before the FM3, and deemed I could survive rehearsal with it. Ultimately, I'd like to off-load my Whammy stuff to the FM3, but didn't have time.
Anyway, after some tweaking after getting to rehearsal, we went at it and the FM3 was REALLY incredible. Since I trying to just stick with the four scenes in the ODS patch, I couldn't do everything I wanted, but it was super do-able. I was incredibly impressed with how useable and GREAT SOUNDING the FM3 was.
My Temp Rig (we go direct using in-ears)
Here are a couple of impressions/observations from this crash course experience:
- The FM3 is pretty much close to gig-ready right out of the box. I am confident if I had a solid day of working with it, I could have had a number of gig-ready presets going.
- It sounds PHENOMENAL. The hype is real. I was blown away by how good that ODS-100 sounded with pretty much no extra tweaking on my part.
- Realism, I couldn't get over while playing how responsive the model was to my volume knob. I found myself staying on the 3rd scene and then using my knob to get the amount of gain I needed. I kicked into scene two when I needed a bit of kick. The break-up was incredibly good sounding.
- The auto-engage wah was SO nice to have. I've used a Bad Horsie in the past, but wasn't in love with the sound. I SO dig being able to set this function up with an expression pedal. I ended up using the medium lag setting and it worked way better than I expected.
- The three-switches are really, really, REALLY clever. I didn't believe it, but I'm fairly certain you can do pretty much everything you'd need live with these. I loved having the dedicated tap-tempo, but outside of that the three switches were easy to navigate with. The MLM construct is incredibly clever.
- I used the "Effects" view more than I expected. Part of this was that I didn't have time to set up all the scenes I wanted, so navigated over to effects to kick in chorus and rotary, or to shut off delay every once in a while.
- I can't wait to dig into the rest of it. My brief taster of the presets really got me excited. We do some spacey acid-jazz stuff so I can't wait to build some presets out for that. I also play lead guitar in an 80s metal band, so can't wait to dive into the high-gain stuff. I will be using the presets from @2112 as my starting place. They sound SO juicy.
- Most of the interface on the FM3 is quite good, but I will admit, some didn't seem intuitive to me. I don't think I could have done what I did if I hadn't have been "pre-studying". This forum is incredibly useful for that.
- I couldn't get FM3 Edit to work. It kept giving me an error about "reading block definitions". It would load the current patch, but just stop working. I searched the forum, but only found something on the Axe-Edit that didn't seem to be applicable. Any suggestions? This is my top issue right now.
- Levels. It seemed like my output levels were really low. I used the same inputs (XLR) that I use with my Elevenrack (which I normally set volume to 6.5). I had to basically turn the FM3 level up all the way to get close. I ended up changing the output levels to +4db which seemed to put me in a more reasonable range, but I was surprised. Any thoughts on this?
- On the ODS-100 patch, I couldn't turn the bypass off on the wah. I could for the other blocks, but not this one. I messed around, but couldn't figure it out. Anyone understand this?
- Whammy replacement. So poking around it seems like I can do everything I do with my Whammy using the FM3, but am concerned about CPU. Anyone else doing this? Currently I have one song where I use the ^4th^5th harmony setting for one song and also fake a baritone for a Mark Lettieri tune using the 4th down statically. I also use the detune feature for some Scofield-esque stuff, which I'm less worried about.
- Mounting the FM3. I know this has been discussed, but I'm not sure I can bring myself to put velcro on this thing. Would love suggestions.
Thanks in advance for any help. And HUGE thanks to Fractal for building such a phenomenal piece of gear. I'm a convert.
