It’s all about the grid

So far, we’ve looked briefly at what a preset is and how to choose one and select the scenes within it. But, in this article, we’re going to take a proper look at What presets are and how they are put together.

So, you’re modeler is basically a collection of amps and effects. A preset is a Rigg made up of the amp cab and effects you’ve chosen all connected together in the order you want. You’ve got 512 presets in the machine. But for each preset, you’ve got to specify how you want your effects connected and for that, you use the grid.

The Grid

Think of you’re grid like an Excel spreadsheet. Each cell

can hold a block which might be your amp, cab or Drive.

Typically, a preset is made in a streight line from one side of the grid to the other because you’ve got 12 cells on the FM3 grid and 14 on the FM9. You can actually use more than that, but we’ll talk about that later on.

So, the first block in your preset is an input block. When you plug your guitar in, it gets connected to the input block.

The last block is an output block. When you connect your modeler to headphones or external speakers, you are connecting you’re preferred speakers to the output block.

Between the input and the output blocks are your amp cab and other effects.

In order to get sound out of your modeler you need to make a connection from the input to the output through each of the effects you want. This is done by connecting the output of one block to the input of the next, typically making a row of connected blocks from the left hand side of the grid to the right hand side. It’s a bit like connecting your axe through your pedal board to your amp really.

We’re not going to talk about how to make connections in this article and, to tell you the truth, it’s possible but a bit tricky with VoiceOver.

The good news is, It’s much easier to take a ready made preset and change it to what you need rather than starting from scratch, so we’ll be doing that soon.

Discovering the effects in a preset

So, very practically, once you’re on a preset, you are going to want to know what’s in it. Now, you already know how to get to the different scenes with command 1 through 8. Obviously, there will be an amp in there somewhere.

So, what I do is open the item chooser and type the word amp. Now, the first occurrence of the word amp is just some text on the page, so come down to where it says something like grid row 2 column 5 amp, then press enter to close the Item Chooser.

Fantastic, now you’ve landed on your amp block. The Amp is normally put somewhere in the middle of the row so that you can have effects before it, typically drives and compressors, and effects after it typically reverbs and delays.

Now I want you to pres vo-left arrow. you have just moved to the effect just to the left of your amp.

Keep going left until you find your input block. If you start hearing jack sockets, you’ve gone too far. Are you on the input block? Great you’re now at the start of your preset.

Now vo-right arrow and you’ll find out all the effects you’re using to make the sound you’re hearing. Note that each time that you land on an effect, You’ll hear VoiceOver say Active, those are the ones you’re actually using , or it will say Bypassed for the ones which are currently switched off.

Keep going right all the way to your output block.

Practice this procedure, Find your amp with the Item Chooser, then vo left or right to see what you’ve got.

Once you become familiar with the effects in your preset, you can use the Item Chooser to go straight to the effect you want by typing a few letters from it’s type like comp, for compresser or verb, for reverb etc.

Selecting and activating effects

Now, just because you’ve used vo left or right to get to an effect, that doesn’t mean you’ve actually selected that effect to change it, you’re just on the effect. To tell the editor that you want to Work with that effect, press the return key. VoiceOver will let you know that your effect is now selected. Great, Now you can start changing some of its settings.

To activate or bypass the effect, pres Shift Vo space twice. That’s double-clicking on the block in the grid. When you do this, VoiceOver doesn’t say anything, but you should hear the change. You can also confirm that the effect is now bypassed or activated by pressing vo+a to read your effect and hopefully, you’ll hear that it’s now on or off. Try it with the reverb effect in your preset. Do you hear the reverb turning off and on? If not, did you remember to press enter on the reverb effect before you pressed shift vo space twice to bypass it?

This is really good, now we’re really getting somewhere. However, you need to know a few more things about blocks channels and scenes.

Blocks and types

OK, so you’ve got an amp block, but which one of the over 300 amps are you actually using? Well, Apart from the input and output blocks and probably a few others, You will find that blocks have a type setting. So, you’re drive block gives you acces to over 40 drives, your reverb block gives you acces to over 60 reverbs, it’s actually insane!

So, find your reverb. Press enter to select it. Open the Item Chooser and type the word type. Then press enter. Finally, vo right once.

You are now on your reverb type, the one I’m on right now is the studio reverb.

Practice this procedure with all of the other effects in your preset to find out what they are. Find the effect as before, then use the Item chooser again to discover the type of drive or compressor your using. We’ll be discussing how you change the type of effect you’re using in the next article, but keep reading to find out more about how channels work.

Blocks Channels and Scenes

The blocks you have in your preset on the grid are set in stone for the whole preset across all the scenes. However, as described earlier, each block has 4 channels, a, b, c and d. That’s why, when you land on an effect, VoiceOver tells you, the name of the block, the number of the block, because you can have several drives delays etc, and then it’s channel. So you’ll hear VoiceOver say something like Drive 1A active. You can use channels in combination with scenes to, for example, have different delays in different scenes. Again, we’ll talk more about channels and scenes later on, but this is an important concept to understand.

Changing Effect settings

OK, now hears the pay off, Now I’m gonna show you how to tweak your amp or drive or reverb or whatever, and guess what, It’s beautifully simple.

Let’s both go to the same preset, so that we can be sure that we’re both trying to tweak the same amp.

Go to preset 0 by pressing command g to bring up the go to preset dialog, then press 0 return.

Right, we’re on preset 0 which is called 59 Bass guy.

Find the amp in the grid, by using the Item Chooser as described earlier. Press the return key on the amp in the grid to select it.

Now, let’s change the bass of the amp. With the Item chooser again, look for Bass and press return on the Bass vertical slider.

VoiceOver will announce Bass and whatever the bass is set 2 from 0 to 10.

Now you can simply use the up arrow to increase it or down arrow to decrease it.

How about changing the trebble? Shal we use the Item Chooser again? Well, we could do, but there’s a faster way, just press the tab key, now your’re on the mid slider, change that if you want. Now press the tab again, you’re on the trebble slider, adjust to taste with the up and and down arrow keys.

But what if you’re on 3 and you want to set it to 8? well, you’ve got direct numeric entry for that! Yep, press the return key on your slider, VoiceOver announces the number that the slider is currently set to. type the number you want and press return to lock it in. Then,you can continue to tab and shift tab among the settings changing them how you want.

Again, practice this procedure with all of the other blocks in your preset.

Changing effect types

There are 2 techniques you can use to change the type of effect you are using. We’re going to look at the first one of them here. Although you will be able to swap out your effect for another one using this technique, this is a bit of a work around. To get the full story, read the next article where we’ll be discussing browsing and searching for effects.

OK, so to change your effect type, first, find the effect you want to change, let’s change our compressor.

Next, select the compressor by pressing return and then use the Item Chooser to find it’s type.

Now, instead of doing a vo right to get to the type of compressor , do a vo-left. When you do this VoiceOver will announce the type of compressor followed by the word popup.

Now, you can use the down arrow to go forward in the list of compressors and the up arrow to go backward in the list.

When you press the arrow keys on these popup controls, you don’t get any speech although the type does change. So, my recommended workflow is to have your left hand ready to press vo A, whenever you want to hear what type your on. I typically do that after each arrow press so that I can hear what I’m on. The types are usually in alphabetical order, so, if you know what you want and what you’re on, you can press the arrow keys a bunch of times and then check where you are. This works best when you’re changing something like a compressor or chorus because you’ve only got 20 or so of those. However, when you’ve got a block with mountains of effects like the amps or the reverbs, this isn’t an ideal way to roll. Don’t worry though, there’s a better way which we’ll be covering shortly, but this does let you choose any type from any block.

Well, we’ve learned a lot in this article, We’ve discovered how to find out what’s in our preset, how to turn effects on and off and how to tweak effects to our liking. We’ve also learned a quick and dirty way of changing our effect types.

In the next article, we’ll be taking a look at how to search and browse for effects and we’ll be using channels to set up our own scenes, see you there.