Presets Scenes and all that jazz

Here’s where you’re gonna find an explanation of most of the jargon that you’ll hear when people are talking about the Fractal modelers on Youtube and in the Fractal forums.

You’ll also learn a bit about how to use the machine itself. If this doesn’t seem very easy or accessible, then I’ve got good news for you. Once we start using the Mac editors, we’re going to get speech access to all these things and that’s where it gets exciting. But, you will need to understand what these terms mean, so please read on.

What is a preset?

OK, plugin your guitar and connect your fractal modeler to headphones or speakers, then play your guitar.

What you’re hearing is a preset, which is the sound of your axe through an amp and some pedals.

Turn the value knob one click clockwise and you’ve got a different preset. Turn it anticlockwise and you’re back on your original preset. You can use the Nav left and right buttons to move backward and forward through presets instead of using the Value knob if you prefer.

There are hundreds of presets available each with a different amp and pedals, try some of them out.

Scenes

Your modeler helps you to avoid “tap dancing” via it’s Scenes facility. Let’s say you have a preset, but in this preset you want the reverb turned off, the drive and delay on and the chorus turned off. But, later in the song you want to kick that drive on along with the reverb and turn the chorus off.

Scenes make this a snap, you can put the first setup in Scene 1 and the second in scene 2. Then, it’s just a single footswitch press to get to the one you want.

You can think of a Scene as a preset within a preset as a scene knows which effects are turned on or off and more.

Each of the presets in your unit use more than 1 scene so when you’re on a preset, use the Nav up and down buttons to move through the different scenes to see what you’ve got. Of course, you can change scenes with your feet and create your own presets and scenes and we’ll see how to do that later.

Have a listen to this video which showcases a selection of the presets available.

Blocks

You’ll hear people talk a lot about blocks with these modelers. Basically, everything in your signal chain is a block. Your amp is a block, its speaker cabinet is a block. Drives delays and reverbs? all blocks. even your inputs and outputs are blocks. So, you want to turn up the bass on your amp? You go to your amp block and turn up the bass knob. Simple right? Well not quite.

You see, every block has 4 channels, A, B, C and D. you don’t have to use all of them of course, but it means that you can have say a clean amp on channel A and a dirty amp on channel B. Literally, you can have a Fender clean on one channel and a cranked Marshal on another, and then you can swap between them using scenes.

This also extends to every other effect, so when you add a drive block to your preset, that gives you access to up to 4 totally different drives, one on each channel.

Footswitch Layouts

We’ve not said anything about the foot switches yet, and how they work is a very deep topic. But, in essence, though there are only 3 foot switches on the FM3, you can decide what you want to change with them.

So, if you’ve got an FM3, when you turn the machine on, the foot switches let you pick between the first 3 presets. With the FM9, the first 5 switches let you choose from the first 5 presets. This is what is called the preset layout.

Now, turn the E knob one click clockwise. now your foot switches allow you to pick scenes. No prizes for guessing that this is the scenes layout. After the scenes layout, you have the Effects layout.

There are several other layouts available which we’ll see later on. but for now just remember that when you here people talking about layouts, they’re talking about what the foot switches do at any given time.

The other thing that you’ll be glad to know is that there’s a way to choose layouts completely from the foot switches so that you don’t need to let go of your axe, bend down and spin a knob mid song – phew!

We’ll definitely be coming back to the subject of footswitches very soon, but next, we need to talk about the software editors, see you there.