So I’ve been on the edge of pulling the trigger on one of these plugins for a while now. I need a low profile alternative to my AxeFX II for a long-term overseas trip. On the Fractal units, you have what are called “Scenes”. They’re essentially a way to set the status of any block in the signal chain (on/bypass, x/y, etc…) and then call upon that configuration at any time with a single click or MIDI footswitch press. This allows you to avoid changing the overall “Preset”, thereby avoiding the audio gap when switching from clean to dirt and vice-versa.
Essentially, it’s a fancy way of saying that there is a baked in memory aspect for the on/off status of every piece of the signal chain that is toggleable at any time.
Why is it that I can’t do this yet with Neural plugins?
For example, why can’t I load up a Preset, set the clean amplifier’s FX/Stomp suite to my liking and then, when I switch to the Rhythm amplifier, have all those FX automatically switch off if I’ve chose to run that amp dry. Then, have that configuration memory persist so that when I switch back to the clean amp the FX statuses I previously set for the clean channel automatically re-engage?
Unless I’ve missed something, it seems as though this behaviour is unsupported which, in my opinion, is an absolute non-starter in the 2022 digital guitar world. Can someone either prove me wrong, or help me understand why this isn’t a default feature yet? I want to buy a plugin, but this is a massive oversight.
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Additional clarification copy/pasted here from a response I made to this question on reddit as it seemed that some people were confused by my question:
I’m not so worried about gapless switching, what I’m wishing for is that when the clean amp is selected (in Petrucci for example) that the FX chain in the plugin remembers what was engaged or not last time that amp was live. And if I switch from the clean amp to the rhythm amp, the FX chain remembers the FX status last time the rhythm amp was used as well. Same story for Lead. If I switch from the rhythm amp to the lead amp, I wish the FX chain would remember that I had Delay and Reverb on last time the lead amp was active and would just automatically re-engage.
This is beneficial in a situation where you’re using a MIDI footswitch or programming MIDI messaging in a DAW. At the moment, if you want to switch from a dry Rhythm amp tone to a wet Lead amp tone, you either need to switch presets entirely (invoking the audio gap), or tap dance on your MIDI controller.
In a perfect NeuralDSP world, this FX chain memory would exist and you’d simply need to switch between amps in the plugin to have all your previously used FX with that amp turn on/off with a single press. This is how scenes work in the AxeFX. It requires a one-time setup of the scene, you hit save and then that scene has now become whatever version of the preset that you’ve assigned to it.
An example from my current setup on the AxeFX is as follows: Scene 1 on any preset is a dry, unboosted Rhythm tone, single amp. Scene 2 is same amp boosted, scene 3 adds a bit of volume, verb and compression for melody lines, and scene 4 is an all out lead sound; boosted, comped, wet with post FX. Scenes 5-8 follow the same incremental steps in “wetness” if you will but for a clean tone instead; from Dry to Ambient.
You can see how this is useful. It takes a single press of a button to invoke scenes instead of tap-dancing on a MIDI controller. The only thing that is required from NeuralDSP here is to code a per-Amplifier based FX chain memory that simply stores the active/inactive status of all FX previously used with a given Amplifier last time said amplifier was live.
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This is the only thing preventing me from purchasing a plugin at this point. I’m really hoping to get the dev team’s attention on this as it would be massively useful for all of us and would drastically simplify MIDI workflow and shorten MIDI configuration time dramatically.