Mags & Piezos with seperate signal paths on an FM3...

[guitarno]

I currently use an FM9 and have several electric guitars with mags & piezos. I use presets routinely where I have a seperate input (Input 2 left only) for the piezo output of the guitar. I use this setup a lot to cover acoustic parts of tunes without having to switch guitars. I run that path with it's own stereo cab with 2 acoustic IR's, no amp, some delay & reverb, maybe a comp block or other effect. I normally just have that run into output 2 along with the mags for live use into FRFR cabs and FOH.

I love the FM9 (and all it's switches) but I want to add some other devices and my board is already heavier & bigger than ideal. Also, I know i could get by with 1 amp and less blocks for most or maybe all of what I do on live gigs, so I am considering if I could do what I normally do with an FM3.

I know there would be some comprimises, but I'm just curious if others are gigging the FM3 like this and what issues you have with it. Any big issues for you? I know for me, paring down to 3 footswitches will be a challenge, but a smaller rig would be nice. I'm sure I'd have to trim the fat from a lot of my presets...

 

[IronSean]

With the three switches you can still get pretty creative with how you use them. I have all eight scenes available to be by using a switching pattern like this:
FS1: toggle 2-3, hold 1
FS2: toggle 4-5, hold to master layout nav
FS3: toggle 6-7, hold 8

I've created some quite complex patches as well that I use regularly.

If you have all the blocks you'll need for your use case I suspect you'll be fine.

 

[jeffgoobs]

My main axe is sort of a hot-rodded version of a PRS Hollowbody I, and it uses a Baggs piezo system with dual outputs. I also, when using the piezo output, will send it into something more FRFR than a guitar amp (usually the PA or an acoustic amp.) I have an FM3, and have some killer patches I came up with for the piezo output, but one thing I can NOT do is use two separate amp blocks within a single preset as you currently do, which would be ideal if I could. That said, there are plenty of amps that, when tweaked properly, can jump between a clean acoustic sound and a crunchy lead via scene changes, and now that gapless switching is upon us in FM3 Land, you can set a secondary scene for the piezo output fairly easily. What this does not account for, however, is if you have tunes/sections where you want to have both the acoustic and the electric sounds happening via different amps simultaneously. I have not been able to figure out a clever way to accomplish this. Whether or not that's a deal-breaker, YMMV.

 

[chris]

I gig like this 3x a week. 4 scenes for electric, acoustic is the same on all. 1 expression pedal, 1 dual foot switch for a few more functions.

I also run a mic into it using a transformer xlr to ts adaptor. I’ll post a screenshot of the preset when I have time.