Switching between clean and dirty amp settings

There have been threads about this issue ad nauseum.
I gigged an Ultra for ten years. I had the II XL+ in my studio rack for quite awhile but never had time to program all my live patches. After getting the III, I finally made the time. (I wanted to use the same pedalboard and the MFC isn’t plug and play with the III so I left the III in the studio rack and programmed the XL II+ for live). I duplicated everything from the Ultra to the II XL+, tweaked and fine tuned, sounded great...switched modes on my MFC, re-mapped.a few buttons as needed, and once it was all working, BOOM dropout city. Sure the patches sound and especially feel better but the gaps between patches are dramatic, even with lots of delay spillover.

I will start to frantically work with scenes and stack amps to minimize the issue, but at the end of the day, workarounds are just that. Very frustrating to go from a high dollar Triaxis-based rack rig (similar to Cliff’s LOL) with seamless preset switching and FX spillover to a first-gen Ultra with seamless preset switching and FX spillover...to newer units where I have to jump through all kinds of hoops to achieve the seamless preset switching that the Ultra had out of the gate. I play a lot of proggy stuff where I can go thru multiple patches in one song, so there is no way to avoid dropouts entirely even though for lots of my patches the only thing that changes is the amp block. If I could stack five amp blocks...maybe LOL but I’m limited to two. I’m still working the issue but it’s a PITA.
 
For those who note that changing amps mid-song can be jarring...yes, you do have to be careful. Going from a 10” combo to a stack just for the sake of changing gain structure messes with the sonic footprint in an unpleasant way. But it’s easy to address. Choose amp sims with a similar sonic footprint (big clean to big dirty, like a Hiwatt to a Friedman), use the same cab block when changing, etc. I don’t go FRFR, I use a power amp and a guitar cab. I use my ears to make the patches stay in harmony, and my feed to the board uses a cab block that sounds like my cab (with a few exceptions). So it stays very organic.
 
If you need gapless switching, another option to think about is to not use an amp block, and just use a drive block (or two drive blocks) into a cab block. You can switch between clean and dirty without any drop out.
 
chrisjnyc said:
If you need gapless switching, another option to think about is to not use an amp block, and just use a drive block (or two drive blocks) into a cab block. You can switch between clean and dirty without any drop out.
Click to expand...

It’s rarely about clean vs dirty for me. In that case I’d add a drive block in front of an amp on the edge and call it a day. In songs with two sounds, life is easy. But I often go through multiple sounds in a tune with varying gain and FX.

I can get it done. It’s just frustrating that I have to use workarounds. The first generation Axe had gapless switching between presets and everything since does not.
 
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