practical approach(es) for building new presets from scratch?

[Alan Benjamin]

Greetings,

Having crammed to learn how to program my new AX8 and wanting to get it up and running for last night's band rehearsal, I decided to try a couple of different approaches to put together an initial draft of the six basic electric guitar sounds I use throughout our repertoire. After sampling most of the presets, I thought it might be best to start from scratch, but that turned out to be a bit less practical than I'd thought. As such, I ended up finding what I thought would be the closest clean sound from a factory preset, tweaked it a bit to the best of my ability, and then added four additional scenes that leveraged both bypassing/enabling blocks and X/Y settings for a couple as well (drive and chorus if memory serves). (I decided to use the stomp switch for toggling chorus on and off for one particular application, which seemed more practical than building a sixth scene.)

Considering how quickly I threw everything together, I was happy that most of the sounds did kind of what I needed, but none of them were really close to perfect--and I don't think tweaking settings within the preset will provide the control I really want to make all the sounds meet my needs. With that in mind, I'm seriously thinking about going back to the drawing board and building four presets from scratch and then seeing how I might be able to better integrate them for optimized switching. (I do a ton of sound switching in our music, BTW.)

With this in mind, I'm wondering if anyone here knows/has/developed a practical system for building new presets from scratch. If so, I'd definitely appreciate hearing the details.

Thanks a lot and take care,


Alan

 

[ChainOfThought]

I use ax8 edit to make it easier, but basically just pick a cab--usually a 4x12 with v30s--then scroll through and find an amp that I think will work right. Once I find the right amp, I scroll through cabs to make I've got a good match. After that, I tweak the amp to get the core tone I want. From there I start adding the effects and assigning them to switches.

At that point I usually get side tracked and go back to scrolling through amps or cabs, but that's beside the point. Just build block by block I guess. If you know exactly what effect blocks you're going to have then I would probably add them all in, set up the routing, THEN start tweaking the tone.

Once I got my basic preset set up, I just copy that and change out the amp and cab models for different presets. I don't tend to do a whole lot of different stuff per preset as far as effects go though. Not yet anyways.

Disclaimer is I'm extremely new at this. Was all line 6 or real amps before I got the ax8 a few weeks ago and I haven't had much time to really tweak it.