Large difference in same amp with fw9.0

JoeyBTL

Inspired
So last night I saw Misha Mansoor post on facebook about how good fw9 is. He mentioned in the post taking the patch Andy's Message (#123), bypassing the modulation effects blocks, and changing the drive block to the BB Pre for a great jam tone. I imagined a number of you have seen this if you follow him or fractal on facebook. Well, I did this and, as usual, he was right. Its a pretty sweet tone to jam on, and with some tweaking that I haven't gotten to yet, I know I'm going to like this patch very much.

Now, I was also reading last night about some mentioning about going into your amp blocks with the new fw and deselecting and reselecting the current amp basically to reset it I guess. I tried this with Andy's Message, which uses the #11 Plexi Normal amp, and it made a big difference and I'm not sure what changed or why. This surprised me a bit because I know in the past fw updates have had people needing to retweak their patches quite a bit but ever since the beta for 9 was released everyone has said that its only made things better and hasn't made any have to tweak anything to get back to their tone. I agreed with that as well.

So, has anyone else been noticing this with other amp models? Any idea what its done to this one? Any other comments are welcome as well.

(I recorded, created a soundcloud account, uploaded and wrote this quickly all while eating dinner before band practice so forgive for mistakes and the sloppy playing lol)

Heres a couple riffs to show you what I mean:

 
It's probably the COMP value in the AMP block. Try turning it back to zero and it should sound closer to what it did before.
 
Comp is at 5 instead of 0 and sag is 2 instead of 4 on fw9 default!

Is that true of all amps or just some? I reset a few and I think I remember comp being 0 on some of them afterwards. I'm just wondering if I'm not resetting correctly.

Thanks.
 
I'm positive some do, unless it's a bug. If I get a chance later I'll check which ones they were but I have a bank with a basic preset for every amp in it and I check them with each firmware release and I defintely saw some at 10. Also, some are at 30 (the Dizzy's) but that didn't change with this release.
 
OK, just double checked. Marshall types i.e. Plexi, Brit 800, Euro's, default to 10. Dizzy's default to 30. Comp goes to 100.
 
besides what Cliff said about default values, from the release notes:


New power amp modeling with improved dynamic response. This new modeling
features improved transformer/plate interaction modeling resulting in better
feel and a punchier response. The Supply Sag parameter is more responsive as a
result. Additionally, crossover and transformer hysteresis distortion modeling
is improved resulting in more overtones when playing softly. This improves
controlled feedback performance and yields a more aggressive tone at lower Power
Tube Bias settings.


i guess this alone makes a great difference between FW9.0 and the previous ones.
 
Not all, some are still 0, some are 5, some are 10, etc.

I know coming out with new FW is hard, but I must admit, these kinds of things really drive me bats. It's a complex beast, for sure, but when FW totally alters your sound, rather than just giving you new options, and especially when it CHANGES values on your existing presets... well, it ain't good. Costs time and energy and there should be a better way. I remember having all the warmth sucked out of my Ultra after a big jump in FW. I actually found 9 beta made most of my stuff warmer, but it did screw up my amp's Y setting - my screaming feedback laden dumble got destroyed, somehow, turned into a shrieking mess. I wish some kind of QC regime could be implemented (or maybe more a philosophy, not a regime) that had two goals: 1) NO changes to preset values in any presets 2) Sonic backward compatibility. I love the new amps, new features, I just wish they could be rolled out in a way that did not often utterly change the character of the entire box. I am waiting for 9.x - I can't afford all the re-tweak time now, especially without Axe-Edit...
 
I know coming out with new FW is hard, but I must admit, these kinds of things really drive me bats. It's a complex beast, for sure, but when FW totally alters your sound, rather than just giving you new options, and especially when it CHANGES values on your existing presets... well, it ain't good. Costs time and energy and there should be a better way. I remember having all the warmth sucked out of my Ultra after a big jump in FW. I actually found 9 beta made most of my stuff warmer, but it did screw up my amp's Y setting - my screaming feedback laden dumble got destroyed, somehow, turned into a shrieking mess. I wish some kind of QC regime could be implemented (or maybe more a philosophy, not a regime) that had two goals: 1) NO changes to preset values in any presets 2) Sonic backward compatibility. I love the new amps, new features, I just wish they could be rolled out in a way that did not often utterly change the character of the entire box. I am waiting for 9.x - I can't afford all the re-tweak time now, especially without Axe-Edit...

Existing presets aren't changed. You are totally misunderstanding what happened. Go back, reread things, think about it a bit and then decide whether what you wrote makes any sense.
 
Existing presets aren't changed. You are totally misunderstanding what happened. Go back, reread things, think about it a bit and then decide whether what you wrote makes any sense.

Cliff is correct here. In case my posts weren't clear, the presets were not automatically changed; once I reset the amp I noticed the different values. For the record, I love the fact that Cliff adjusted exposed parameters rather than adjusting base, hidden values. This allows us all to see what changed, how it changed, and allows us to change the values back if we don't like the new values. At the rate Cliff is going he may not need to code anything at all soon, he'll just need to adjust all of the exposed values to what they need to be! :D
 
Cliff is correct here. In case my posts weren't clear, the presets were not automatically changed; once I reset the amp I noticed the different values. For the record, I love the fact that Cliff adjusted exposed parameters rather than adjusting base, hidden values. This allows us all to see what changed, how it changed, and allows us to change the values back if we don't like the new values. At the rate Cliff is going he may not need to code anything at all soon, he'll just need to adjust all of the exposed values to what they need to be! :D

+1!
 
Existing presets aren't changed. You are totally misunderstanding what happened. Go back, reread things, think about it a bit and then decide whether what you wrote makes any sense.

I think you are technically correct, but with due respect you may have missed the point: I had the same experience that the new Pick Attack parameter was set to -100 on some presets but not others. So my existing presets were changed, and in a way that was hard to track down but rendered them useless. It was an issue that is further problematic in that some knobs are defaulted to the minimum position (I.e. zero is at 7:00), while others default and are zeroed at noon. This parameter was the latter, but I didn't read the release notes carefully enough to be aware of that. Shame on me for not RTFMing! So when I started going through the lengthy set of parameters to see what had changed, this one did not stick out as being odd. Resetting the block did not fix this issue: the preset JavaJunkie looked at and diagnosed for me was saved after resetting the block several times, including once replacing the amp block, storing it, then restoring that block from a global block.

I love getting updates, love the improvements, but I don't think this type of "criticize the user" strategy will serve FAS well long-term. Thank you for all your hard work. But consider the possibility that perhaps you might have misunderstood what happened, please, and not the poster you were responding to.

In an ideal world, I think the update would reset appropriate blocks by itself, but leave user-adjusted parameters as they were, would list out what the default settings are, and would properly default any new parameters. But, again, thank you for giving us what you can!
 
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