Good points. I would also argue, that freely assignable FS and secondary functions would help here. Like:
Do that for every FS, make it latching or momentary and you already got 16 scenes instead of 8. Same with stomp and hybrid mode. Pretty sure a lot of people wouldn’t need to switch presets that often anymore.
I honestly don’t really see what is the issue with adapting to the specific workflow of a given device, that’s pretty much par for the course.
I mean, when I went from Cubase to Pro Tools, then to Logic Pro, I was aware I’d have to adapt to the idiosyncrasies of the software and I couldn’t expect things to work exactly the same.
And it’s pretty much the same for everything. Going from a Yamaha CL5 to a DigiCo SD7 or a Midas Pro 2, I’m pretty much expecting that different brands and devices, while at the end of the day doing pretty much the same things (as they’re all large format digital mixers), will have specific workflows and ways of doing, labelling and organising things that WILL be different. That’s normal, and expected.
What does it mean ? That if you don’t want to adapt your workflow ever or don’t want to learn a new device logic, either stick to a brand that works for you, or go and design something that works for you. That’s pretty much how every successful brand started: wanting something that wasn’t quite available (or available at all), designing it and finding out that others like it too.
Maybe at some point NDSP will implement seamless preset switching, but demanding it from them because such and such brand does it is, IMHO, the wrong mindset.
We are in the Feature Request section. Of course, you can request something like this here. If not here, then where? And plenty of good reasons why it makes sense have been given. It doesn’t matter whether anyone has already implemented something like this or who did it. So what’s wrong with requesting a feature that would really be beneficial?
The discussions here often remind me of “I can easily get from city A to city B with my horse-drawn carriage. I’ve always done it that way. Why invent a car? If I don’t need one, then anyone who wants one has no idea.”
“We need gapless preset switching because I don’t want to do the work of dialing in my presets” is a ridiculous angle to take.
I want for everyone to have this, truly. But I feel like I need to cut in and say… We’re now living in a time where we have an embarrassment of riches.
20 years ago, most of us were using tube amps and pedalboards, and we made do with what we had. Now we nitpick our digital modelers down to the tiniest details like latency, stereo capability, MIDI (no one cared about this 15-20 years ago), and whether or not they can do gapless preset switching.
I’ll stay out of this thread from now on. Everyone who wants this feature should vote on it. Just try to keep a cool head, folks.
Not sure I understand this point. I have a bread and butter preset with bread and butter scenes that I use for many songs. Why should I duplicate this and then change all copies?
Then I have special presets for the songs which need special sounds, like your Purple Rain example.
I guess what I don’t understand is why I should ever want to switch presets during a song.
The only use case I personally see for gapless switching is if one song follows the next and sounds have to spill over.
But don’t get me wrong, if gapless switching is important for your workflow, it’s totally fine of course. I only would not like to give up DSP power for this feature. But if it’s switchable, why not.
“Why should we climb down from the trees and walk upright? We have fruit up here too.” Just because you’ve come to terms with something and it fits your own workflow doesn’t mean the same applies to everyone else.
Because there are many guitarists who can’t get by with just one preset and eight scenes. There are so many different genres of music. Or Top 40 cover bands, for example. If you read through the thread, you’ll find many who have one preset per song. They then have a problem when they have 40 songs and want to re-record their amp capture because they now want to use v2.
The problem here is that so many only thinks about how they themselves currently work. No one considers whether they might benefit from such a feature in one situation or another, or whether there might be other people who have different requirements. So often, the attitude here is “If I don’t know it, I don’t want it.”
I was literally asking because I tried to understand the problem. And it’s still not clear to me why you need more than 8 scenes per song even if you play Top40 songs.
But I don’t have to understand everything, no problem.
I will leave this thread alone 
Haha, a last try to explain it :-). I think there are many guitarists who have more than 8 sounds in their entire set (at least all guitarists in my personal bubble). Now they have two options.
1. Reduce them to 8 sounds in general, which would be silly given the possibilities of a QC.
2. Divide the sounds into several presets.
Since you don’t have seamless switching, many will set up their presets so that they switch between songs. But then all presets have to have some of the same content if, for example, you always want to have the same rhythm sound but want to vary the other parts. And then you have duplicate presets that only differ in a few settings, with the above-mentioned problem that if you want to change something, you have to do it across multiple presets.
The more songs you have in your repertoire, the more difficult it becomes.
A few reasons for that I can think of are:
I think this topic is a bit misunderstood by many, because you either have these problems, in which case you really want that feature, or you don’t. Just like some people want a modeller with many options and others just wanna have a tube screamer.
Not real gapless preset switching, really. At least in the Fractal AM4 (is the one I have).
Reality is there are artifacts even when changing Scenes, or switching the delay off… that’s what I’ve seen until now.
They call it “gapfill”. Very smart, but not real gapless. They fill the gap with sound. It’s not always noticeable. But, for me, it’s a problem.
Most people in their forum don’t seem to worry about it.
I just have a separate preset for each song, and find it’s super helpful. I can make a main preset for the basic sound I want, and then have a scene for each tone I want in the song. Originally when I got into modeling I thought it would be easier to have a preset per sound, but I realized that was way more annoying.
It would be amazing to have gapless switching since I like to have drones or loops between songs live. Currently when I switch a preset it has the slight gap which is annoying
It may be my age, but still trying to understand.
I also have much more than 8 sounds, so I have one preset per song. Although some songs use the same preset if sounds are similar. And I have scenes for all sounds I need within one song.
So in your setup, if you would have gapless switching, you say that you would switch from a rhythm preset to a lead preset in the middle of a song?
And in another song you would use the same rhythm preset but a different lead preset, for example?
Sounds very complex, esp the footswitch setup must be difficult. But yes, I think I understand that this is a valid use case for gapless switching.
I think the use case that @in5y372 described is none of the ones you described, that’s why I was confused. But maybe I totally misunderstood.
This really bugs me out … i need gapless preset switching …
I have ambient sounds/interludes between songs and everything is automated.
I can’t have seamless interludes because the preset switching kills them.
And because I play stereo through a real cab and direct, it would be really lame to have a dedicated freeze or looper pedal on my board, because I would have the need to add this to both signals and stereo …
My current workaround is using a looper after the QC, but before my power amp. Would love if the QC did have gapless switching for the reason you described.
I feel like Neural assumes most of their users have backing tracks that carry sound through between songs, etc. Which is very inaccurate. But they’re probably getting their main feedback from the bigger metalcore artists that they all gave QC’s to for free for sponsorships
I think neural assumes you will use scenes instead of presets for this purpose.
More likely that most bands have a pause between songs and maybe say a few words while changing presets.
If you have a Looper block on both your current preset and the preset you’re switching to (your “destination”), and the Looper is playing when you switch, it continues without any interruption. So it is possible for the QC to keep a sound going.
If truly gapless switching isn’t possible because of fundamental design choices in the QC, it would be great if we can have something to just cover up the gap.
I would be very happy with something like this: if both your current preset and destination preset have X% CPU available, then continue playback (ideal) - or hold / freeze (next best) - the current sound until the destination preset has loaded, then quick crossfade across to the live signal. If there isn’t enough CPU available on either the current or destination preset, you get a gap as you do now.
I can’t speculate how other bands use their QCs (perhaps if you don’t use enough distinct tones to need to switch presets between songs, you can use one set of scenes for the entire show?). I can only speak from my experience, where I often play solo ambient interludes and segues between songs while the rest of the band takes a second. The setup for these interludes needs them on different presets to the songs either side, because they are very different rigs and often have their own scenes within them. The current gaps in switching are very noticeable in this, so anything that can be done to cover up the gaps would be appreciated.
I recently switched from the Fender Tone Master Pro to the Quad Cortex. Tonewise the QC works much better for me. However, not having gapeless switching between presets is a huge draw back. I had to completly rework my workflow to a single preset with scenes making the setup really complicated and also limited compared to what I was used to.