Importing patches/presets

G

GuitarEC

Member
With my FM9 about 24 hours away on a UPS truck (if tracking is to be believed), I'm starting to look thru the Axe-Exchange at various patches and presets inspired by some of my guitar influences. Not a lot for FM9 compared to the selection of Axe-fx 3 patches. How easy/difficult are they to import? Is it worth the time and energy?
 
Super quick and easy to import. It's a bit of a time suck in terms of playing through them to see if they were worth looking at.
EDIT: just realized that you meant importing FM3 presets. I don't know about that at all. But still hold to the recommendation below.

I'd recommend starting with the factory presets. They are really good and probably get you whatever you want. Next I'd go to the Gift of Tone presets. A lot of gold in there. Finally, people like Cooper Carter and Leon Todd have produced some very cool presets based on actual gig experience that are quite instructive. That's a lot of collateral.
 
Last edited:
GuitarEC said:
With my FM9 about 24 hours away on a UPS truck (if tracking is to be believed), I'm starting to look thru the Axe-Exchange at various patches and presets inspired by some of my guitar influences. Not a lot for FM9 compared to the selection of Axe-fx 3 patches.
Click to expand...
FX3 presets can import pretty easily, but missing blocks will be changed to shunts or dropped entirely.

And then there’s the problem with the FX3 having 2x the CPU compared to the FM9. FX3-Turbo presets exist where someone built a kitchen-sink plus disposal and reverse-osmosis system into it and they will make a regular FX3 raise CPU warnings; the FM9-Turbo would probably lock up. Because they use the DSP and CPU differently sometimes the FM9 can pull off some magic, but it is very iffy.

You definitely will have better luck with FM3 presets, which always load and work.

GuitarEC said:
How easy/difficult are they to import?
Click to expand...
I don’t even try to pull them directly into the FM9. I have an FX3 and use it as my sandbox to adjust the preset, then move it to the FM9 and see how it does. Sometimes it works the first time, sometimes it doesn’t.

There are a couple ways to import them using Edit:
  • Presets > Import.
  • Drop the preset file from the desktop onto the name box of the preset in the editor.
  • Open the Preset Manager and drop a preset on a preset slot.
  • Open the Preset Manager and drop a preset on the browsing pane on the left. You can also drop the containing folder, or a backup file from one of the banks of presets.
  • Open Tools > Fractal-Bot and click Send, select or drop a backup bank file and restore it to a bank of presets.
Presets made using more recent versions of the firmware are more likely to work correctly, even if they were created using the current generation of the modeler because the firmware has changed significantly since the FX3 was introduced. You might have to reset block channels and then start adjusting from scratch because of the changes.

Personally, I rarely bother with the presets in the Exchange. I’ve had too many issues with presets or they were not what I wanted/expected. Off the top of my head I’ll recommend any that @2112, @Cooper Carter, @simeon or @Burgs post. I have torn into their presets and manipulated them for my personal purposes. Burgs has some that are for the FX3 and need to be broken down a bit, which I’ll do and repost for FM9 or even FM3 use. Beyond that I recommend the commercial packs by @austinbuddy which are a great deal.
 
Last edited:
Some FX-III presets work fine, some not so much. Really depends on what blocks are in each preset. If there's blocks that don't exist in the FM9 then there's some cleanup & re-arranging to do, and you might not get the intended sounds. You can use "FracTool" too to preview & import presets made for dis-similar units.
 
guitarno said:
You can use "FracTool" too to preview & import presets made for dis-similar units.
Click to expand...
Be careful with that. FracTool is a great tool, and Al worked really hard on it, but the internals of the blocks are full of black magic which FracTool doesn't know. Give it a try but be prepared to make adjustments, and maybe even have to reset channels in blocks.

I appreciate the work he did trying to decipher the .syx files, but it's a huge task that keeps growing. I wouldn't want to have to support it.
 
guitarno said:
You can use "FracTool" too to preview & import presets made for dis-similar units.
Click to expand...
For moving between FM9 / FM3 / Axe Fx III there is really no need for FracTool and it's not the recommended tool for the job.

Al created a great tool, but this isn't the place to use it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom