Fractal Axe FX III setup and configuration
Turning on the Axe FX III for the first time was an underwhelming experience for me, but a few tweaks made it amazing!
In 2018, I sent a unit back because I couldn’t get any usable sounds out of it for my needs, but I must admit that I didn’t put the effort in that I should have to optimise its performance. In 2020, I got another and although the experience was better, I still didn’t really click with the sounds in the same way I did with my old Axe FX II XL.
Fast forward to 2022 and I had the same issues as I did in 2019, it sounded muffled and as if there was a blanket over the speaker. I hated it when I first plugged in.
Your mileage may vary, you might like that type of sound, but I don’t so for those of us who want to get the most out of the Axe FX III, what can be done about it?
1. Factory reset
I sought advice on the fretboard and as I had bought my unit second hand, the advice was to do a factory reset and follow advice from some quick videos.
Although it’s unnecessary, I cleared all the presets on the unit but left the cabs. I was fairly sure that the presets weren’t the problem and it was even more unlikely to be a problem with the cabs, but in case there were some changes made to the factory presets by the previous owner, I replaced them with a fresh bunch of factory presets using Fractal-Bot.
I did the factory reset by doing the following:
- Enter ‘Setup’ menu by pressing the ‘E’ knob
- Scroll down to ‘Utilities’
- Page across to ‘Reset’
- Push ‘A’
- Optionally, you can clear all Presets here, too, push ‘A’ on that menu item if you wish to do so.
- Optionally, reload all factory presets via Fractal-Bot.
- Press ‘Exit’ (saving is not necessary, your preferences are saved and are now applied.)
2. Global settings
I leave most things at default, but there are a couple of settings I like to tweak, as follows:
- Enter ‘Setup’ menu by pressing the ‘E’ knob
- Scroll down to ‘Global Settings’
- ‘Power Amp Modelling’ — ‘On’
- ‘Cabinet Modelling’ — ‘Active’
- ‘Tone Control Display’ — ‘Authentic’ (change to taste)
- Under ‘General’, change ‘AC Line Frequency’ to ‘50Hz’ if you live in the UK or keep it as default (‘60Hz’) if you live in the USA.
- Press ‘Exit’ (saving is not necessary, your preferences are saved and are now applied.)
3. I/O settings
- Enter ‘Setup’ menu by pressing the ‘E’ knob
- Scroll down to ‘I / O’
- Strum your loudest guitar on it’s most powerful pickup and ensure that the input meter barely touches red when you strum the guitar at its loudest. This is referred to as “tickling the red”.
- Move the corresponding input knob (usually ‘Input 1/Instrument’) up or down accordingly so that you barely see the red light. It doesn’t matter if it flickers occasionally, that’s okay, you’ve still got plenty of headroom and you’re not clipping at this point. According to Fractal, this should never be dialled in to 0% or a low percentage.
- Go to the ‘Audio’ page (press ‘page >>’ right)
- Set the output level to +4dBu
- Press ‘Exit’ (saving is not necessary, your preferences are saved and are now applied.)
Cabs, things to remember about Impulse Responses (IRs)
Cabinets are the hardest, most time consuming part of acclimatising to the Axe FX ecosystem. It’s where I’ve tried and failed to connect with the unit, until now. This is where the “blanket over the speaker” sound that I referred to earlier happens. The wrong cab can ruin the sound. In my case, I loaded up a JCM profile that had some pretty dark cabinets and I needed to liven things up a little.
The wrong IR can ruin your tone. In some ways, the Axe FX lives and dies on the strength of your chosen IR.
I’m fairly confident in saying that, even though it’s a strong statement. For me it’s very true, if I don’t like the base tone of an IR, I can’t enjoy what I play. IR’s can sound boomy, honky, brash, finding the perfect one can feel like finding a needle in a haystack. I questioned if I’d done the right thing in buying an Axe FX after I’d spent two hours auditioning different IRs. It’s quite draining.
We’ve grown up listening to music on records. A large majority of popular rock music was recorded with an SM57 dynamic microphone in front of the best sounding sepeaker that matched the amp in question. Some popular pairing’s were Celestion Greenback’s with a Marshall, Vintage 30 speakers with a Dual Rectifier and Celection Blue’s with a Vox, for example. Sometimes a odd pairings will work, but ther’es a reason that someof these pairings have been used on so many records.
It’s definitely worth researching what speakers were used with the amps you enjoy using. And furthermore, it’s worth researching what speakers were used on the records you enjoy listening to.
For example, David Gilmour used many but a well known pairing that he used throughout his career was a Hiwatt DR100 amplifier with Hiwatt cabinet’s loaded with four 12" Fane speakers. So, when recreating a Gilmour style FX chain in the Fractal, or any other device, you’ll get closer to your desired tone by using approximations of that pairing. The ‘Hipower’ preset has all this ready for you and there’s very little to tweak in order to start enjoying those Floyd tones. A little effort and work and you can get it to sound even more authentic. I’ll probably cover this in a later post.
Things to remember with cabs:
- Start with an IR which has an SM57, usually denoted in the title of the cab with ‘57’. For me, this is the most familiar sound of what electric guitars into popular amps sounds like on record — the sound of an Sure SM57 mic.
- Make sure the mic is quite close to the cap of the speaker, this will give you the brightest tone, you can work backwards from here if it’s too much, or you could use EQ.
- Match the speaker to the amp (see above).
- High and low cut are important. This can be done with post EQ or in the cab block itself. Narrowing the EQ range with high and low pass filters helps remove frequencies that don’t matter when it comes to electric guitar. That’s anything below 90–120Hz and anything above 800Hz-1200kHz (I sometimes go down as low as 550Hz). Overall, this has the effect of tightening the tone remarkably and is worth doig as a matter of course, but use your ears, not the numbers. And each amp will need different filtering.
Start with a blank preset but borrow from other presets
Play around with the factory presets. Find the amps you like in those presets (if you don’t already know what amps you enjoy) then copy the amp and cab block into a blank preset of your own and learn to build on top of that base tone.
Same with effects. If you find a delay, pitch or chorus block that sounds great in a particular preset, copy it into your blank preset and start learning how the blocks work together in the full chain to make the broader sound.
Remember that the controls can mimic the real amp controls
I immediately dialled in what I thought was my “go-to” JCM 800 tone, but I set the Master Volume way higher than I normally would on the real amp (see above picture, it’s hovering around ‘3’). This lead to me ramping up the master volume on the amp model too much, way more than in the above picture of my actual amp. So much so, in fact, that things got muddy quite quickly. But after reading some advice about the JCM 800 algorithm in the Axe FX, it seems that in pushing the Master Volume, it tames some of that signature high end of the amp, and in doing so, I attenuated it too much for my needs.
“It is a very bright model. However, it sounds exactly like the amp it was based on. If it is too bright, you can adjust the various tone controls and parameters to reduce the brightness to your tastes. They are designed to be run loud and the brightness decreases as the MV is increased. The sound of 80’s hair metal for sure.”
I’ve come to learn in recent days that I can use this to my advantage, in treating it like I would the real amp. For example, if I need some bright, picking dynamics for the lighter strings, then turning the Master Volume down does wonders (pretty much where it’s set on the picture above on my old JCM 800), it retains clarity and sheen. Then, for a lead solo, it helps to drive the amp harder, darkening the tone a little to get more compression out of the sound. It’s really quite incredible how good and responsive the dials are on the amp controls within the Axe FX III, use them, automate them, put them on an expression pedal, whatever…just make the most out of them, they’re a gift!
The closing thing I want to get across in this section is that my Axe FX settings are almost identical to what I used on my real amp, and it sounds superb, dare I say, very close to the real thing. Way more than I could hope for and far more acceptable a resemblance than anyone in an audience would ever notice. I’m very happy.
Conclusion
There’s no doubt the Fractal Axe-FX iii is a daunting piece of gear. With over 200 amp models and over 1000 cab IRs, just calling up great amp tone alone can feel overwhelming.
When I first became a Fractal user, I spent hours upon hours in my studio learning what amps I liked, what cabs sounded great (spent way too much time doing that!) and what parameters to move around to create the tone in my head. It seemed like weeks before I finally felt comfortable with the gear, and I felt like I spent too much time fiddling and not enough time playing my guitar!
— Mathew Dale, https://www.youtube.com/@mathew_dale
This sums it up for me. A lot of time is spent in the early days of owning an Axe FX and much of it is on finding the IRs.
These initial tips may or may not solve issues you might encounter with the Fractal, but they helped me a great deal and in all honesty, (despite the title of this blog post) I’m on day 3 now and I’ve already found my tones and have been playing inspired riffs with it. And that, for me, is the key…inspiration, and the Axe FX III delivers inspiration in spades.
