Provide a mechanism for non-preset based changes

tandrewnichols

tandrewnichols

Well-Known Member
That title is terrible cause I didn't know how to phrase it cause it isn't actually a feature request, so much as me saying "I need a way to do this and I don't know what that is." It would be really nice to have a way to continue to use presets, but to also have sets of changes that occur outside of presets and that are immune to preset changes. Let me give you my use case for clarity.

I have multiple guitars and an EQ pedal. I want to EQ some of those guitars differently, but I don't always play guitar 1 on song 1 and guitar 2 on song 2, so . . . it needs to be dynamic. To achieve this in the current system, I would have to duplicate EVERY preset I want to be able to play with different guitars AND EVERY SONG that uses those presets, and then include the right one based on which guitar I want to play for that song. And then that completely precludes me changing my mind about that.

My first thought was, maybe I'll just make a button that cycles through those EQ presets, but then as soon as I change presets, that gets undone. I could not set EQ ever with presets and only use that button, but if I'm honest, that's not really what I want to do (but it is a viable workaround). I don't honestly have any great suggestions for how this should work. Song actions or macros maybe would be one way to do this, since you are probably unlikely to change guitars mid-song. It does mean you have to decide and configure it up front and can't change your mind. Another idea that maybe gets hard to implement and is more like "programming" would be having a button that sets a "variable" (in this case a device preset for one pedal) and then allow presets to use "variables." So I could create a button that sets my "Electric EQ" to (e.g.) "EQ 1" and then any presets that use "Electric EQ" would set "EQ 1" (this is different than the button-that-sets-eq-and-then-don't-set-eq-in-presets idea above in that it works for multiple things. So I could have an "Acoustic EQ" and an "Electric EQ" and bind those to presets that need them and then just change presets like normal and only need to touch that button if I change guitars.

I'm open to other ideas on this as well cause I know that last one would be harder to implement.
 
A third idea would be a System action that can disable device presets. So I could make a button that changes EQs and also disables device PCs to my EQ pedal. I'm not in love with this cause I have a piezo guitar so I sometimes use both acoustic and electric EQs in the same song if I toggle between piezo and magnetic pickups.
 
I think the appeal of the variable idea is it would have other applications. Like it would let you implement a "Return to Previous Device PC" button because you could store the current PC in a variable, go to a new one, and then use the variable to return to the previous PC. And there are probably a lot of other interesting applications too.
 
Interesting and powerful ideas, but definitely not an easy thing to implement. Anything I put into these controllers, I want to make as general purpose as possible. General purpose conditional operations and/or variables would be tricky, but definitely worth looking into.
 
tandrewnichols said:
I think the appeal of the variable idea is it would have other applications. Like it would let you implement a "Return to Previous Device PC" button because you could store the current PC in a variable, go to a new one, and then use the variable to return to the previous PC. And there are probably a lot of other interesting applications too.
Click to expand...
I know this doesn't help for your original question, but you can do this using a PC action with special value "Previous"
 
tandrewnichols said:
How would you set this up today? What do you think is the best approach for now?
Click to expand...
I think decoupling the EQ from preset control, while not ideal, is probably the best answer for now. Since you're manually (and unpredictably) switching guitars, manually switching the EQ to match makes sense to me.
 
I do think is probably impossible when I'm using the piezo guitar cause I'll need 2 EQ settings, but I don't want to have to select a preset AND an EQ setting when changing from, say, a verse to a chorus.
 
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