MFC-101 For Dummies

Galen Cane

Galen Cane

Inspired
Please tell me there is one :-|

I need a kind of ELI5, step by step thing with pictures and arrows to get me started.

--
This is a new trick, and I am an old dog.
 
randolfo said:
You just started it. What do you want to do?:)
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I’m guessing this is quite simple when you know how but I’m struggling a little.

I’d like 5 preset patches [I’ve already written these] along the bottom row.

The ability to add / switch effects on and off with the other buttons.

Tuner

Boost [if there is such a thing]

And my Boss-FV500H set to Wah as soon as I move the pedal.


Could you just come over to my place and show me? ;)
 
Galen Cane said:
I’m guessing this is quite simple when you know how but I’m struggling a little.

I’d like 5 preset patches [I’ve already written these] along the bottom row.

The ability to add / switch effects on and off with the other buttons.

Tuner

Boost [if there is such a thing]

And my Boss-FV500H set to Wah as soon as I move the pedal.


Could you just come over to my place and show me? ;)
Click to expand...

There already is a tuner button, you can set it to mute output on the Axe if you want it to tune silently.

You want a bank size of 5, thus making the other 10 switches efx on/offs.

You can assign what each of the ten switches does on the MFC by altering their assignments. So if you like switch 9 to be flanger, go into the menu and assign it to Flanger 1, etc.

The simplest Boost is to add a volume block in your patches and assign Volume 1 to one of your ten efx switches.

You'll need to calibrate your Boss pedal, read manual and set it up for auto-engage for your desired wah usage.
 
All depends on what you are trying to do. For song/set mode I think it's essential. Changing your tx map, or if you have a setup outside just changing a couple IAs nice to not have to button press. Fedit has a few extra bells and whistles too such as printing your song/set lists, having a visual of your IAs, MFC label maker, .syx dump file cheker, and offline songs. Both tools offer a free trial and worth checking out to see if right for you.

Cheers
 
Rockguitarzan said:
Speaking of MFC GUI editor, what kind kinds of things are made easier by using one?
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I thought that it'd be kind of a waste if I wasn't gigging (which I am not), but I just happened to get to use a demo of both just when I got my MFC and to be honest it comes down to mashing a bunch of buttons or clicking through a tabbed interface as to which you prefer.

But the coolest thing is that just seeing what all it did in the tabs helped me to not have to read the manual much at all. Granted I wasn't just coming into the AxeFX world and I had been programming my old foot controller, but there's still a ton of things that you kind of have to sift through in order to get to the stuff that matters to the individual. I just clicked on the tab and saw what was going on and within about an hour I had the thing figured out.

I just wish that I had setlists and crap to really take advantage of these apps fully.
 
Hi Galen,

The MFC seems complicated at first, but it's really easy once you get into it a little. It's made to do most of what you said by default with the AXE, but the learning curve to get it to do other things is about two hours. Everything you need is right in the wiki and luke described it all pretty plainly above, but I'll spell it out to get you started. I hope I got this right, as I'm not at my MFC and I haven't programmed it in a long while...

First be sure you are in AXEFX mode. See page 12 in the manual here:

http://www.fractalaudio.com/downloads/manuals/mfc-101/MFC-101-Owners-Manual.pdf

For 5 presets on the bottom row look in the manual at page 17. You hold the "edit" button on the MFC, until it starts blinking, press "setup", then press Page (the 6 or 7 button) until you come to "Bank Size". Then press the "up" or "down" button until it says "Bank Size 5". Then hit the "edit" button again, which saves the setting. You now have five presets selectable by buttons 1 to 5 on the bottom row, which will probably be presets 000 to 004 in the axe. When you hit the "up" or "down" buttons, you change the bank to the next 5 presets, which, if you hit the up button, would be 005 to 009. Hit up again and the buttons control presets 010 to 014. Pretty simple.

To setup the rest of the buttons to control effects, check page 21 and 22 in the manual. Press edit>midi then keep hitting page until you come to "IA01 AxeFX FILTER" (FILTER is an example, it could be any block name or function). This screen tells you that Instant Access button 1 is set to control the filter block. If you hit up, you will scroll thru IA buttons 01, 02, 03, etc. Hit up until you get to IA06. Then press button 12 to select the next parameter in the line, then hit up or down, until you get to the block you want to control with that button, say Drive1. When the screen says "IA06 AxeFX Drive1", button 6 is linked to the Drive 1 block in the AXE. You can hit edit again to save it, or press "parameter" to go back to "IA06" and hit up to go to "IA07". Then press parameter again to move right, then press up/down to select the next block name, say Delay1. the screen would now say "IA07 AxeFX Delay1". You can keep editing IA buttons until you are happy then press edit again to save things. In the above example, button 6 will control Drive 1 and button 7 will control Delay 1 in every preset. To keep it simple, just setup buttons 6 to 15 to control blocks for now. The block must be in the preset for it to work. That's it.

You can assign the tuner to any IA switch, but there is a special way to set it to come on when you hold the tap tempo button, which is what I use. See page 69 in the manual.

For a boost, insert a filter block (e.g. Filter1) in your preset and set the level for +3db to +6db, however much you want. Setup one of the IA switches to control Filter1 and you have a boost. there are a lot of different ways to do this, such as a volumne or drive block or controlling the boost switch in your amp.

To setup your pedal to turn on the wah block when you move it, first calibrate your pedal in the MFC, page 68 in the manual. Then go to this part:

http://wiki.fractalaudio.com/axefx2/images/7/73/16.13.2_Using_an_Expression_Pedal_on_an_MFC-101.pdf

of the wiki and work thru it. You need to edit the Axe so that external 1 is linked to the correct CC# (I think it's 16 for the first XP) and set the wah block in the axe to use an external controller 1, with auto engage. It's pretty simple if you watch Chris' video (Katsukuri media).

http://blog.katsukurimedia.com/2012/07/mfc-101-axe-fx-ii-setting-up-expression-pedals/

Ask any questions you want, but you should be getting the hang of it my now.

Hope this helps and sorry in advance if any of this is wrong. It's been awhile since I've done this stuff...
 
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What do you think of this? assign ia switch one(global) to switch between scene 1/2. Scene one being a rhythm setting, scene 2 to add boost, or overdrive and whatever for soloing, scene three rhythm with chorus or whatever. other scenes for any number of configurations. engage "reveal" and switch one becomes toggle between scene 1/2. so if you are using scene 1 stomp ia 1 and bam you have soloing. if you are using scene 3 and stomp ia 1 bam you got soloing. I like it because its like a boost.distortion,overdrive pedal that YOU configure for each patch. That way you step on ia 1 to get solo and step on it again and you are back to where you started. yeah!
 
Hi all, first post here ! Been using the MFC for 2 months in a non-AFX rig (the MFC controls a RJM Mini Effect Gizmo and TC G-Major 2), doing lots of gigs with 2 bands (one is around 30 gigs a year, the other one is 40 gigs in the 3 months of summer), and making extensive use of song/set mode, which actually was a main reason for going for a MFC-101 rather than any of the other available MIDI controllers.

jjozwia said:
All depends on what you are trying to do. For song/set mode I think it's essential.
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Definitely ! The other day I had to program a couple of presets on the fly between soundcheck and show, edit a song and add it to the set in use, and doing it without the offline editor is much slower and requires writing down presets, song and song position numbers, which made doing a simple edit much more annoying than it would have been with the editor.

As a side note, after testing both editors, I eventually went with Fedit. Both are good, I like MFC-Edit's user interface better (it's easier to program presets with it IMO), but like Fedit better for editing setlists, since you can drag and drop presets and songs into sets instead of having to choose from scrolling lists (I use around 40 presets, into 60 songs, into 4 setlists), so in the end, Fedit was better for the way I use the MFC101. YMMV though, it's a matter of personal preference.
Props to the creators of both controllers btw, it makes a very good tool even better !
 
Thanks for the kind words NicD. While drag-n-drop isn't released (yet) in MFC-Edit, if you've checked the "Popup Axe-Fx Presets" option on the EXTRAS page you can just click the name of the actual Axe-Fx Preset (exported from Axe-Edit) and it will insert the preset into the Song at the current position. It makes that operation a little more intuitive, at least until dnd is ready.
-G

NicD said:
Hi all, first post here ! Been using the MFC for 2 months in a non-AFX rig (the MFC controls a RJM Mini Effect Gizmo and TC G-Major 2), doing lots of gigs with 2 bands (one is around 30 gigs a year, the other one is 40 gigs in the 3 months of summer), and making extensive use of song/set mode, which actually was a main reason for going for a MFC-101 rather than any of the other available MIDI controllers.


Definitely ! The other day I had to program a couple of presets on the fly between soundcheck and show, edit a song and add it to the set in use, and doing it without the offline editor is much slower and requires writing down presets, song and song position numbers, which made doing a simple edit much more annoying than it would have been with the editor.

As a side note, after testing both editors, I eventually went with Fedit. Both are good, I like MFC-Edit's user interface better (it's easier to program presets with it IMO), but like Fedit better for editing setlists, since you can drag and drop presets and songs into sets instead of having to choose from scrolling lists (I use around 40 presets, into 60 songs, into 4 setlists), so in the end, Fedit was better for the way I use the MFC101. YMMV though, it's a matter of personal preference.
Props to the creators of both controllers btw, it makes a very good tool even better !
Click to expand...
 
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Both are great utilities and provide alternate methods of cracking the same egg. Very happy to see people satisfied with the choices available to them so they may decide which process flow works best for them... It's also great to see the number of users that leverage both.

Cheers
 
bwanagary said:
Thanks for the kind words NicD. While drag-n-drop isn't released (yet) in MFC-Edit, if you've checked the "Popup Axe-Fx Presets" option on the EXTRAS page you can just click the name of the actual Axe-Fx Preset (exported from Axe-Edit) and it will insert the preset into the Song at the current position. It makes that operation a little more intuitive, at least until dnd is ready.
-G
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True...except I'm one of the few MFC-101 users that don't use an Axe-FX ;)
(I'm using it with a rig composed of a Marshall DSL100 halfstack, TC G-Major 2, and RJM Mini Effect Gizmo controlling a bunch of pedals)

I chose the MFC for other reasons, ie the song/set mode (the LFPro can't handle enough songs in a given setlist for what I do: I'm currently playing 4 hours sets with 50-something songs, that I condensed into 29 songs on the MFC), footprint, number of IA switches (12 is just fine for what I need, plus I added an external switch for tap tempo and put a couple GM2 FX blocks I don't need to access on the fly on the Reveal switches), flexibility of IAs (namely being able to send several CCs on a given IA, reversing CC values for a switch, etc) and availability of PC editors, while not being too expensive on the 2nd hand market. Brilliant piece of kit, I love it, it's much deeper than the Rocktron All Access and Voodoo Lab Ground Control Pro I've used previously while being just as easy to use.
 
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