Hey there
@Joe_Nowhere
Welcome to the forum and keep us informed if the fractal is an amp killer in your experience.
In my case: I have never owned a Tube amp myself, so yeah really interested to know.
Cheers
Well, after some delays in the delivery process ( partly due to me changing the end location after it was initially shipped ), I finally got my B-stock FM3. There's one small blemish on it , about 3cm in diameter where the paint/coating isn't quite 100%, other than that it looks quite lovely.
It took me several hours to figure out how to get it connected and functioning the way I wanted ( using Output 2 into 'return effects' on a tube amp/speaker. I think I must have copied Input 1 to Output 2, rather then Output 1 to Output 2 because now matter what presets I choose, it all came out 'clean'...
But anyway I eventually got that sorted out too. In the process of fiddling with all that, I did get much more familiar with the screens and how you maneuver around the system... So even though I didn't get any really good sounds out of it during the first 3 hours or so, I did learn a lot.
Oh, and the tube amp I was originally working with , must have had a tube die on me during all that initial fiddling around, so I had to get another amp out of storage and use that. ( Tubes aren't always the most reliable of things in the universe ).
Eventually I did get to the point where I sampled a fair number of the presets and thus far am pretty impressed with those, but my real deep desire is to explore making my own sounds/presets. I'm not much of a guitar player, but I love the different sounds that different amps and effects can make, which can get pretty expensive if your buying all kinds of pedals and amps , as you seek new ( or try to recreate old sounds that people made in the past with amps and pedals, etc... ). I'd say at this point, I'm poised to really start diving deep into what can be done with the FM3.
I can say with , virtually 100% certainty that I wish I had this thing about 10 years ago.... I could have saved a fair bit of money, by not having to buy amps and pedals on my quest to play with guitar sounds. The 'feel' of playing through the FM3 is absolutely no different than playing through a Tube amp, and for me that's HUGE. I LOVE the way you can go into the bowls of an amplifier and tweak stuff, it's really a feature that I never even really imagined would be possible a few months ago. I had been contemplating building my own amps, just to get sounds and such that I craved, or at least that I had wanted to hear and/or learn about the controls on some older ( Early Fender amps mostly ) amps... and well, to try to shorten this post up a bit. I really am 100% convinced that the Fractal FM3 is going to keep me satisfied with all the fiddling and such I want to do, for quite some time..
I think the only thing the FM3 can't do, that I may some day want to do, is to be able to put two different amps in the signal, so I could play with that too... I guess to do that you need the AXE-FX III, so maybe in a few years I'll be looking to upgrade, who knows.