Charry
Inspired
I Love my fractal products and I was very excited when Fractal announced the new Song/Setlist feature, I come from the 80's and 90's rack era where most pro foot midi controllers had this clever feature, so when this was announced for all the actual Fractal products it felt like home.
After installing the beta firmware and testing this feature on my FM9 I was a little disappointed to be honest, there where a lot of things that I think are not that well implemented or maybe they are just not needed in this device. I know most of them have already been mentioned on the Axe-fx III section, but I guess it won't hurt if I mentioned them again after testing it myself.
I'll try to explain this as best as I can with the way I'm using the FM9 and my regular workflow.
I play in 3 main bands, I do also studio work and sometimes I get some "extra" random gigs. The way I'm using the FM9 is quite simple I think. Each preset is a song, and each song has different sections, normallly between 6 and 8, so the FM9 is perfect for me because I can set 8 different scenes in each preset (song) without audio gaps in between. Everything is pre programmed so I only need to change scenes live. This works perfectly, maybe the only downside I could think of is how to organize presets when setlists are changed and specially when you play in more than one band, plus the studio work and other things. That's why I was so excited when the song/setlist feature was announced. I thought this was gonna be a perfect way to have a setlist for each band and the other stuff. But as I mentioned before I encountered some flaws.
1. Songs can only have 6 parts, most of my songs need 8 parts, so this is a problem for me. A hack could be assigning scenes 7 and 8 to the last two switches to the song layout. So, in this situation I think there is no benefit for me using this layout vs the scene layout really.
2. In my scene layout I like my ring LED's totally off (not dimmed) or on, this helps a lot my switching live. Sadly the Scene layout is the only layout that let's you do this, the song layout doesn't behave this way, so that's another thing that just doesn't work for me.
3. I really thought that when you named a song the title would replace the one on the preset in the FM9 screen, it doesn't, so that's confusing. Yes it does appear for a moment when you press each switch but that just doesn't work live at all in my opinion.
4. The fact that you can't have more than 10 characters is so frustrating for me due to the fact that most of my song names are very long and similar.
All in all I think In my case the song layout doesn't provide everything I need, so I'll just keep on using the scene layout, and that's cool, you don't have to use everything that's implemented on the unit. But what about the setlist function? I do really need that one, the problem is that it only works with the song layout, not the scene layout.
I know most of the things I mentioned about the songs feature has been discussed and it seems it can't be upgraded due to different factors and that's cool. But there should be a way to use the setlist feature without depending on the song layout, I just wanna organize my banks in 4 different setlists as it exists already, but not with the song layout, with the scenes layout.
Sorry for the long post. I really hope this could be implemented, if not, it's alright, the FM9 is still the best amp modeller and FX processor to this date and I couldn't be happier with it.
After installing the beta firmware and testing this feature on my FM9 I was a little disappointed to be honest, there where a lot of things that I think are not that well implemented or maybe they are just not needed in this device. I know most of them have already been mentioned on the Axe-fx III section, but I guess it won't hurt if I mentioned them again after testing it myself.
I'll try to explain this as best as I can with the way I'm using the FM9 and my regular workflow.
I play in 3 main bands, I do also studio work and sometimes I get some "extra" random gigs. The way I'm using the FM9 is quite simple I think. Each preset is a song, and each song has different sections, normallly between 6 and 8, so the FM9 is perfect for me because I can set 8 different scenes in each preset (song) without audio gaps in between. Everything is pre programmed so I only need to change scenes live. This works perfectly, maybe the only downside I could think of is how to organize presets when setlists are changed and specially when you play in more than one band, plus the studio work and other things. That's why I was so excited when the song/setlist feature was announced. I thought this was gonna be a perfect way to have a setlist for each band and the other stuff. But as I mentioned before I encountered some flaws.
1. Songs can only have 6 parts, most of my songs need 8 parts, so this is a problem for me. A hack could be assigning scenes 7 and 8 to the last two switches to the song layout. So, in this situation I think there is no benefit for me using this layout vs the scene layout really.
2. In my scene layout I like my ring LED's totally off (not dimmed) or on, this helps a lot my switching live. Sadly the Scene layout is the only layout that let's you do this, the song layout doesn't behave this way, so that's another thing that just doesn't work for me.
3. I really thought that when you named a song the title would replace the one on the preset in the FM9 screen, it doesn't, so that's confusing. Yes it does appear for a moment when you press each switch but that just doesn't work live at all in my opinion.
4. The fact that you can't have more than 10 characters is so frustrating for me due to the fact that most of my song names are very long and similar.
All in all I think In my case the song layout doesn't provide everything I need, so I'll just keep on using the scene layout, and that's cool, you don't have to use everything that's implemented on the unit. But what about the setlist function? I do really need that one, the problem is that it only works with the song layout, not the scene layout.
I know most of the things I mentioned about the songs feature has been discussed and it seems it can't be upgraded due to different factors and that's cool. But there should be a way to use the setlist feature without depending on the song layout, I just wanna organize my banks in 4 different setlists as it exists already, but not with the song layout, with the scenes layout.
Sorry for the long post. I really hope this could be implemented, if not, it's alright, the FM9 is still the best amp modeller and FX processor to this date and I couldn't be happier with it.
Last edited: