For guitar players, it’s all about the tone, getting together the right combination of guitar, amp, speakers, and effects pedals that best approximate the idealized sounds that we hear in our heads. When I was starting out this was accomplished by trial and error, swapping lots of equipment in and out of your “rig.”. It was time-consuming and could get expensive. Often too expensive. There were lots of amps and effects I would have loved to try but couldn’t afford. In the modern era, this has become a lot easier and way less expensive through the use of digital signal processing, or DSP. Trying that rare vintage amp you’ve been lusting after as part of your rig is just a mouse click away. Nowadays a single, small DSP device called a modeler can replace a truckload of equipment, producing the sounds we seek and feeding them directly to a mixing console in a studio, to a front-of-house mixer, or to an actual amp, at a live gig.
I recently upgraded from a Line 6 FX100 modeller to a Fractal FM9 and for me, this was a giant leap. Designing virtual guitar rigs on the FM9 is much more intuitive. Using it, the whole modeler concept came alive for me in a way that it never did with the FX100. It all makes sense now.
I will take a moment here to recognize that there are some/many players who prefer to work with real physical equipment. For them, digital processing using a modeler in place of physical equipment doesn’t produce the tones that they’re after. If that’s you, then fine, you probably should quit reading now, (if you haven’t already.) If you’re not sure that that’s you, then you really ought to consider giving a modeler a try. You may be astounded. I know I am.
Before the FM9 I really didn’t get what a modeler was supposed to be. To me, the FX100 was a souped-up pedalboard-in-a-box, a collection of effects between my guitar and my amp that I could tinker with. Now that I’m using the FM9 I see a modeler as a more comprehensive solution, potentially replacing everything in the rig except for the guitar. Plenty of pro players are using a modeler that way these days. Using a modeler lets them travel light.
Generally speaking what a modeller provides is a collection of digital models of many different amplifiers, speaker cabinets, and effects pedals. The modeler includes some sort of a digital user interface that allows the user to wire together a virtual rig, chaining the individual components they want to use together much like they would do by physically plugging the guitar into a series of pedals on a pedal board, running cables from the pedal board to one or more amp heads, connecting the amp heads to speaker cabinets, placing microphones in front of the cabinets, and plugging the mic cables into a mixing board. With a modeler, you build a rig like this by dragging icons that represent each piece of equipment in the chain into a diagram of the rig and then drawing the wires that route the sound from one device to another. Virtual knobs associated with each device tweak the sound in the same way that real knobs on a device would. Additional virtual knobs provide adjustments that go way beyond those that were available on the real device. Once the rig has been diagrammed and tweaked in the modeler, simply plug in the guitar, connect the modeler to a mixing board, and play. The modeler will have stomp buttons and volume/wah style pedals that can be used to make changes in real-time, just as a regular pedal board would. What exactly each of those buttons and pedals does will be programmable to various degrees depending on the specific modeler being used. The buttons on the FM9 are extremely programmable and flexible.
I’ve been having lots of fun with my FM9. It’s a “9” because it has nine stomp buttons on it. This is the mid-range, mid-price model. There is also an FM3 with 3 buttons and less DSP capacity at a lower price. At the high end of the range is the Axe FX III which mounts in a rack and pairs with an FC-12 floor controller with 12 stomp buttons. All three of these modelers can be paired up with one or more volume/wah “expression” pedals that can be programmatically assigned to one or more of the modeler’s “knobs” to control the sound while playing. They can also all be extended with additional FC-6s or FC-12s if more stomp buttons are needed.
The FM9 and the others are configured through the built-in LED screen and buttons or through a computer using the free FM9-Edit software for Windows or Mac from Fractal’s website. There are separate versions of the editor tailored to the FM3 and the Axe called FM3-Edit and Axe-Edit respectively.
The FM9 attaches to a computer through a USB cable as a MIDI device and as a DAC audio device. In addition to configuring the modeler using the editing software Fractal provides via the midi interface, your favorite audio software tools can be used to play audio like backing tracks on the modeler from your computer, or to record the modeler output into your audio production workflow. The line outputs on the modeler are fully configurable to do things like send a mono or stereo signal to monitoring and front-of-house sound systems while, at the same time, feeding a mono or stereo signal to onstage guitar amps if that’s your style.
If you’re shopping for one of these modelers be sure to check the Fractal website for their latest prices. Earlier this year they dropped their prices significantly with the release of a new generation of these modelers. As I understand it, the latest generation uses faster, cheaper, more readily available DSP chips. When I bought my FM9, some of the third-party resellers I checked had not yet caught up and were still showing the much higher, older list prices, (and perhaps still shipping the older generation modelers?)
