Using expression pedal for distortion

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Sugaragus

Member
I have my first gig next weekend with the FM9…not gonna lie, I’m a little nervous as I’ve always been a pedal board guy. I like the distortion sound on the Rat pedal and was debating between using 2 Rat drives or using 1 and having the expression pedal control the distortion amount. Has anyone used the pedal this way and what are your thoughts? We’re a 90’s cover band so I need a wide range of sounds and was hoping this option could work. Let me know what you think. Thanks!!
 
Yes for sure! You can assign the Pedal 1 controller to the Rat’s gain knob and then experiment to see if that works for you.

How saturated your amp is will be a factor to manage large volume shifts that may come with the changes in the Rat’s gain level. If you want to change EQ etc across several blocks to account for changes in Gain it may be better to use Scenes and / or channels.
 
Thanks for the note on this as I was worried on volume swells too. I’ll mess around with it. Since the show is in 5 days I won’t have time to do scenes or learn anything like that so my plan is just getting 1 rig setup and using it like a pedalboard for the first show. Having surgery end of month so I’ll have a few months to learn all the cool stuff over the winter like scenes, setlist, etc. thanks man, appreciate it
 
Yes, you can use your expression pedal on any parameter that will accept a modifier, and that's a lot of them. As @NattyBar said above, you may run into volume changes when you do that. The fix for that is to also attach the same expression pedal to the Level parameter, and adjust the modifier curves to compensate.

But there's a bigger factor at work here. If you're nervous about your first gig with your FM9, keep it simple. If you don't have time to learn scenes, you won't have time to learn about morphing one sound into another with an expression pedal. If that means using two presets with different RAT drives, then so be it. After you've got a gig or two under your belt, and you start to feel like, "Yeah, this is going to work," then you can get fancy. :)

By the way, I think you'll find that scenes are pretty simple to learn.
 
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Thanks for the response and in between my post and this comment, I figured out scenes. I didn’t realize how easy it was and that it keeps all of the same pedals and settings in each scene and that each scene just picks and chooses which effects are automatically on. This is awesome as it keeps me from having to hit a few difference buttons to go to a solo or back to the verse. I’m looking forward to learning more stuff for future shows. I’m running into front of my Marshall so I’m not using an amp or cab at this time. Thanks!!
 
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You can also change block channels in the scene to allow you to have a Rat set with a lower drive and/or level on channel A, then have a hotter version of it on channel B. Or even change to a completely different drive model with it's own settings. Channels + scenes allows complex shifting rigs to be set up and controlled very simply.
 
Note that you can also assign an expression pedal to the amp's gain control and/or to the amp's 'preamp boost' amount - many of my presets have one of the expression pedals assigned here so I can vary the saturation on the fly.
 
You can set limits on the max and min of the parameter expression control so that you don't get zero or infinite drive.
 
Thanks again as I now worked in scenes too. I think I’m just about set for Saturday’s show. I have 3 presets and the main setup has 6 scenes so I’m not even using the effects layout anymore like I thought I needed to. This is way better…less dancing to hit all the buttons. I have 1 main question/issue. When I try to re-arrange the buttons for the scenes on 1 preset, it changes the layout on my other presets too. To explain this better, I have my main setup in preset #400 for 90% of my songs. When I go to preset 399, which is for 2 other songs, if I rearranged the button layout on FC Edit, on preset 399….when I go back to preset 400 my button layouts are also rearranged. Is there a way to arrange the layouts in preset 399 without preset 400 changing? Thanks again for your help
 
Sugaragus said:
Thanks again as I now worked in scenes too. I think I’m just about set for Saturday’s show. I have 3 presets and the main setup has 6 scenes so I’m not even using the effects layout anymore like I thought I needed to. This is way better…less dancing to hit all the buttons. I have 1 main question/issue. When I try to re-arrange the buttons for the scenes on 1 preset, it changes the layout on my other presets too. To explain this better, I have my main setup in preset #400 for 90% of my songs. When I go to preset 399, which is for 2 other songs, if I rearranged the button layout on FC Edit, on preset 399….when I go back to preset 400 my button layouts are also rearranged. Is there a way to arrange the layouts in preset 399 without preset 400 changing? Thanks again for your help
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The switch layouts are global; they're not per-preset. If you change Layout 3 in one preset, you've changed Layout 3 for all presets.

For your needs, crack open the manual and look up (ahem) Per-Preset Switches. :)
 
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