I wanted to share my categorization of the three most common pedalboard control paradigms that I run into, hoping that this will shed some light on why I am asking the things I am asking, and why I am sometimes having difficulties with some of the proposed solutions.
Keep in mind that even though I’m dividing these into three concepts, they often share some common standard utilities like tap tempo, tuner access, and expression pedal functions for volume and wah, regardless of the core type.
I’m using the term “Multi-FX” to describe products such as the Line 6 Helix, Neural DSP Quad Cortex, Fractal’s Axe-FX and Fender’s Tone Master Pro among many many others. Basically hardware boxes which let you add, route and switch “FX” such as amp modellers, choruses, reverbs, etc.
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Preset Switchers: Most if not all of the entire pedalboard is dedicated to calling up presets, which may be switched multiple times within a song. A lot of people who came from Bradshaw Boards like to operate this way. The big downsides to this are time gaps and/or audio spikes during switching. People who operate this way often get extremely good at finding places to hide the switching such as right before a note. Preset “spillover” (such as reverb and delay trails) available on some Multi-FX systems can also help mitigate some of the downsides of preset switching. Gig Performer handles this pretty well in the form of “Rackspaces”. There can still be some gaps and spikes from switching Rackspaces, but I find it switches faster and smoother than anything but the Boss GT-1000 (arguably as the GT-1000 switching can in some cases have a noticeable gap). Setlist mode seems to have the same switching performance as Rackspaces. I’m not sure if there’s a way to do spillover here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if using Global Rackspaces could handle a lot of that.
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Stompers: The board is split; roughly half the pedals select presets, while roughly the other half toggles individual effects on and off. In some variations, all pedals control individual effects, and another function is used to select presets (using a multifunction MIDI controller for instance or on the Helix where hitting a bank up or down button will show you a bank of presets which once selected return you to stomp mode in the newly selected preset). Gig Performer seems to handle this paradigm perfectly using Rackspaces. I have yet to run into a situation where I had any problem setting Gig Performer up this way with a MIDI pedalboard. I’m sure my take on this could be improved, but as far as I can tell, Gig Performer handles this paradigm with flying colors
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Snappers: Pedals call up “snapshots” (settings within a preset). Typically, the top row selects global presets and the bottom row selects snapshots, though, like Stompers, some systems dedicate all pedals to snapshots, with another function for preset selection. I have found several ways in Gig Performer to make these both gapless and spike free, I’m probably using too many instances of the same plugin to handle this, but so far it doesn’t look like I’m anywhere near running out of power on an M1 Mac Mini. This has been my hardest paradigm to translate to Gig Performer. It seems like Panel mode will be the way to go for this one. Because variations and song parts use the same command, I haven’t come up with a way in Setlist mode to start a song with the proper variation without the pedals becoming rearranged in function. Also, the “Ignore Variations” setting in Widget properties also ignoring Song changes is particularly tricky for me to deal with. I would hope there were a way to chose whether or not to extend that to include or exclude changing songs from this function.
These are generalizations, and a degree of hybridization is common, especially between paradigms 1 and 2, and often within 2 and 3.
For paradigm 3 especially, but also sometimes for 1 and 2 when they use a hybrid approach, there are another couple of gotchas. When it comes to the recall of settings, often users want to chose whether, after making changes to a variation A(say turning a wah pedal on while you are playing) and then switching to variation B, when switching back to variation A, either resetting to the original saved value of the Rackspace or Song Variation, or whether it should be in the same state as it was last left in. Also whether a switch toggles an FX to its opposite bypass state (toggling changes bypassed to active or active to bypassed) vs directly specifying bypassed or engaged based on the pedal state (for instance, values >=64 mean active and values < 64 mean bypassed)
Preset switching of individual plugins has been a difficult point for me, and in the last few days I have asked our programmer to make sure our plugins could do this as exposed parameters and learned that it’s not the easiest thing to do, which is likely why it’s so uncommon. I do see plugins that can put patches into a setlist or grid to handle it, but I think we will be allowing PC messages to switch ours (and making sure it passes that PC value out on change as well so that Gig Performer’s widgets can be properly updated), even though this does bring up headaches about reordering and hitting preset limits.
I’d love any and all suggestions, keeping in mind that a lot of these ways of working are unlikely to be broken willingly by their respective aficionados, but don’t let that stop you! Especially interested in spillover ideas for paradigm 1, the Preset Switchers, as I think I am still not quite grasping the power of Global Rackspaces.
