Front panel poll

Is the front panel fine how it is or could it use some improvement?

  • Fine How it is

    Votes: 94 37.2%
  • Needs improvement

    Votes: 77 30.4%
  • rats behind, don't use it enough to have an opinion either way

    Votes: 82 32.4%

  • Total voters
    253
  • Poll closed .
Needs improvement. The new shortcut functions helped a lot but I am not overly fond of its layout that is almost the same as the first gen Axe-Fx. It was never a "don’t fix what isn’t broken" type thing. To me the placement of buttons around the big knob is not great and removing the Axe-Fx 2‘s dedicated shortcut buttons made it worse if anything. The best improvement was moving the knobs under the display.

If I was to rearrange the current control panel, I would swap the navigation and big knob section positions so that there’s less hand movement needed between under the screen knobs and nav/page keys. The controls you use the most. Home and Edit would go under the big knob, above Enter/Exit.

But overall the issues with the onboard UI are not the hardware as much as the software and that is something Fractal can fix. Plenty of suggestions big and small on wishlists for all models. I am not talking about some huge overhaul but small improvements in many places make a river.
 
Honestly, donot care about the front panel, doenst concern me cause its a rack unit and always connected to my pc and monitors, and if i were be playing live and have a super urgent need to tweak, would carry my 2 kg macbook with it, doesnt really make it tougher or non ergonomic considering how sleek it is.


Though if one intended to use from the front panel, maybe we could have a giant giant touch screen, use some iteration of on device axe edit , with a little less than half screen on right for parameters which can be browsed by touching/ swiping and the bigger half on left showing the signal chain for easy on the go editing, and navigation so you just touch what you wanna open. The fingers will do all the navigation the mouse doesin the axe edit/. This suggestion is ofcourse for the future units.
(leaving aside all physical knobs below ofcourse for convenient turning maybe), physical buttons for navigation will always leave more to desire . Though for the handful of times i have used it, it wasnt really difficult, even if not straight forward.
 
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I use the front panel 95% of the time.

I dislike switching between pick and mouse, and the panel interface is ok with me. Obviously, if you don't use it much it'll be less familiar to you, the same is true of Axe-Edit.

I appreciate the recent navigation shortcuts, very much, but wish the double click ones worked from everywhere. That should have been caught by the UX team before release, and if not, fixed in one of the recent small updates. I hope it will be soon.

In short, "needs" improvement? No. Could use some tweaks? Sure, most things in life could.
 
I come from the AX8, FM3 and now the Axe III. Most all my editing is done with Edit. However the two performance pages give me the ability I need to edit all I need at gigs, where it really comes in handy. The Fractal products are so involved and deep, to think it's going to be easy on such a small screen to dig deep, would be a stretch. Edit is so easy and clicks away, not sure why you need more than Edit and the Performance pages?
 
I come from the AX8, FM3 and now the Axe III. Most all my editing is done with Edit. However the two performance pages give me the ability I need to edit all I need at gigs, where it really comes in handy. The Fractal products are so involved and deep, to think it's going to be easy on such a small screen to dig deep, would be a stretch. Edit is so easy and clicks away, not sure why you need more than Edit and the Performance pages?
Axe-Edit is not always available if you don’t drag a laptop with you and Perform pages are not only limited in the number of controls but also require planning beforehand to have the right controls mapped. I think Fractal would do well to expand it to support far more controls.

Especially on the more portable units like the FM3 the better the onboard UI, the less you need Axe-Edit. I would not want to manage for example footswitch assignment with the onboard UI, even if that’s not something you change often.

To me the new double click shortcuts did a lot to make it faster to work on the onboard UI without relying on Perform pages. I wish Fractal added more of that sort of convenience and also improved the consistency of the onboard UI views.

Personally I prefer using physical controls over clicking with a mouse/keyboard.
 
Front panel editing is alright. Only thing I miss about editing/creating directly on the hardware without using computer software from my Helix days is the capacitive foot switches. Well.....except if you play barefoot.
 
I use axedit most of the time but the front panel is very functional considering all that it does - at first the front panel was a little clunky but one muscle memory kicked in my use of it got smoother.
 
I disagree... I use the editor MORE on my FM9. Why? Because it's mounted on a pedalboard that's on the ground! I'm to old/lazy/fat to be bending over for tweaking. :)

Maybe if you stick it on your desk. Mine is in battle mode all the time ;)
FM9 is large enough that I wouldn’t put it on my desk either. FM3 is a very desk friendly unit. Like you, I don’t like bending over to adjust things either so I would put the FM3 for example on top of a cab because I don’t use its onboard switching at all.
 
Id be really frustrated if the front panel was all I had. I think it needs some TLC. A lot of buttons with sort of similar functions that could be combined.
If I need to deep dive into the manual to navigate the UI, it is a bit much IMO. A good UI usually presents your options clearly without confusion.
 
Id be really frustrated if the front panel was all I had. I think it needs some TLC. A lot of buttons with sort of similar functions that could be combined.
If I need to deep dive into the manual to navigate the UI, it is a bit much IMO. A good UI usually presents your options clearly without confusion.
Curious why you would need to deep dive in the manual to do something on the front panel that you can do without that requirement with the editor?

Maybe some examples?

I feel like I could see people saying this when in fact it's only because they learned how to do it in the editor but not on from the front panel.

Not saying that's true for you, but genuinely curious.

I personally do sometimes have to spend more time finding some advanced parameters but that's kind of the benefit of GUI in any case.
 
I've been a front panel guy for years since I had my AxeFx2. I use Fractal Bot for auditioning patches and IRs and can't even remember the last time I use Axe Edit. I definitely don't do anything too fancy though.
 
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