shredi knight
Power User
After being a Standard user for several years, I upgraded to an Axe Fx II last week. As with the Standard, I'm using a Ground Control Pro midi board & 2 Boss FV-500H expression pedals with it. When I used my Standard, the expression pedals were both connected to it's 2 rear Pedal jacks and had always worked with no problems. The Axe Fx II (as I found out) only has 1 Pedal jack, so I decided to use the 2 Pedal jacks that are on the Ground Control Pro. This seemed to be working ok until last night when I created a preset that had one of the expression pedals setup to control the Input Gain of the Delay Block to control the amount of delay in real time. When the toe is all the way down, there should be no delay, and when the toe is all the way up, there should be tons of delay. The problem was, I could still hear very slight delay repeats when the pedal was in the tone down position. I tried everything I could think of (I should mention there's no way to calibrate pedals on the Ground Control Pro), but I could not get the Delay Block's "Virtual Input Gain Knob" to go to the 100% position. through testing, I figured out that the pedal was off by 15 increments of the Axe Fx II's "virtual knobs", meaning if you had the Input Gain knob set to go to 100.00 with the pedal in the toe down position, it would only go to 98.5. This was the case with both of my pedals and with anything that could be controlled via expression pedal in the Axe Fx II, not just the Delay Block's Input Gain control. I then noticed that when I unplugged one of the pedals from the Ground Control Pro, the "Virtual Input Gain Knob" went to 100% and the slight repeats were gone (if I plugged the second pedal back in the knob moved back and the slight delays returned). Weird I thought, so I decided to have one pedal connected to the Ground Control Pro and the other to the Axe FX II's Pedal jack.
This worked and I should have just left things alone, but the weird problem with the Ground Control Pro was bugging me (why would using both Pedal jacks at the same time cause both pedals not to work correctly?), so I retried it and the result was the same. So I turned everything back off, reconnected one of my pedals to the Axe FX II's Pedal Jack, turned everything back on, re-calibrated the pedal on the I/O CTRL page, set EXT CTRL 2 to "Pedal" and returned to the patch with the controllable delay.
Here's where the real problem showed up. When there should be none, there was now lots of delay in the toe down position. I went to the Delay Block and saw that the "Virtual Input Gain Knob" was now somewhere around 55% when it should be at 100%. I tried re-calibrating the pedal, using a different EXCT CTRL choice, reversing the Start & End points on the Input Gain's Modifier page, reversing the ends of my cable, and using my other expression pedal/cable with the Axe-FX II. Nothing helped. I even unplugged everything overnight, re-calibrated/reset it all back up today, but the problem is still the same. The Input Gain control would not go to the 100% position.
Here's a pic of how the Input Gain's Modifier page is set up, and a pic of where the Input Gain control is at when my expression pedal all the way in the toe down position:
I don't understand why the pedal is now acting like this, when earlier, when it was set up the exact same way, using the same patch, it was working fine (and believe me I am kicking myself for not leaving it alone then). And like I said, both pedals are behaving this way when connected to the Axe Fx II's Pedal jack, not just 1. It's also this way on any patch, on any parameter that can be controlled with an expression pedal. Does anyone have any idea what the problem is? Would a system reset do any good (and could a system reset wipe out your user patches)? Could it be my cables? I'm using high quality stereo 1/4" phone plug cables, as specified in the FV-500H's user manual for setup to use as expression pedals.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm about to go crazy trying to figure this out.
Thanks.
This worked and I should have just left things alone, but the weird problem with the Ground Control Pro was bugging me (why would using both Pedal jacks at the same time cause both pedals not to work correctly?), so I retried it and the result was the same. So I turned everything back off, reconnected one of my pedals to the Axe FX II's Pedal Jack, turned everything back on, re-calibrated the pedal on the I/O CTRL page, set EXT CTRL 2 to "Pedal" and returned to the patch with the controllable delay.
Here's where the real problem showed up. When there should be none, there was now lots of delay in the toe down position. I went to the Delay Block and saw that the "Virtual Input Gain Knob" was now somewhere around 55% when it should be at 100%. I tried re-calibrating the pedal, using a different EXCT CTRL choice, reversing the Start & End points on the Input Gain's Modifier page, reversing the ends of my cable, and using my other expression pedal/cable with the Axe-FX II. Nothing helped. I even unplugged everything overnight, re-calibrated/reset it all back up today, but the problem is still the same. The Input Gain control would not go to the 100% position.
Here's a pic of how the Input Gain's Modifier page is set up, and a pic of where the Input Gain control is at when my expression pedal all the way in the toe down position:
I don't understand why the pedal is now acting like this, when earlier, when it was set up the exact same way, using the same patch, it was working fine (and believe me I am kicking myself for not leaving it alone then). And like I said, both pedals are behaving this way when connected to the Axe Fx II's Pedal jack, not just 1. It's also this way on any patch, on any parameter that can be controlled with an expression pedal. Does anyone have any idea what the problem is? Would a system reset do any good (and could a system reset wipe out your user patches)? Could it be my cables? I'm using high quality stereo 1/4" phone plug cables, as specified in the FV-500H's user manual for setup to use as expression pedals.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm about to go crazy trying to figure this out.
Thanks.
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I think that's why I never used the GCP's Pedal jacks when I had my Standard. 