New Fractal FM9 floor unit - looks good!

March

A friend of mine has just got his FM9 and is already singing its praises. He already has a Helix Floor and a Kemper, but says that the FM9 is usable straight out of the box, no tweaking necessary.

Nerine

Well looking forward to getting mine. 

Looking forward to pissing about with it endlessly. 

And using it at gigs obvs. 

Anyone run a wah pedal in front of it? I dunno whether to eventually get an expression pedal or not. 

exocet

Nerine said:

Well looking forward to getting mine. 

Looking forward to pissing about with it endlessly. 

And using it at gigs obvs. 

Anyone run a wah pedal in front of it? I dunno whether to eventually get an expression pedal or not. 

I use an FM3 with Expression Pedal for wah, I think it's fantastic and I really don't like using a standard wah with an amp anymore - either the tone is wrong or the pot goes noisy - don't have that issue with an expression pedal.

DavusPG

Nerine said:

Well looking forward to getting mine. 

Looking forward to pissing about with it endlessly. 

And using it at gigs obvs. 

Anyone run a wah pedal in front of it? I dunno whether to eventually get an expression pedal or not. 

You won't need a traditional wah, just an expression pedal (I have a Mission spring loaded)

The wah models in the unit are superb and endlessly tweakable to taste with EQ. There are settings for all the dunlop wahs kicking around online. I was able to clone my old Cantrell wah, but with the advantage of adding a volume boost too.

I caved in and took up my invitation to buy an FM9 this morning, hoping they get it sent out today 

DavusPG

fastonebaz said:

That EV 12 looks great. 

So tempted to get one but

£2000 fm9 turbo
£900 EV 12
500 hrs tweaking

Still need a board with wireless, expression pedals
May want a backing frfr cab too

Decisions decisions

Does it really sound that good? 

It's utterly subjective, but I think so yes...

Starting with the FX8, I've had the AX8, AxeFx3 and now FM9 and they've been the biggest GAS killer in 30+ years of playing guitar. There's a learning curve for sure, and they aren't for everyone, but they work for me.

The beauty with it though is that should you choose to do so you can incorporate other gear with them really well, I never sold my tube amp and although it sat in the cupboard for a good 3 years, I've recently been using that with the effects in the Axe, or on some presets using modelled amp sounds, and in some presets a combination of the 2. For ease at gigs I'll probably revert to all modelled presets which are still stored in the unit. Once you've got your head round the interface (which is far better than it used to be) it's pretty quick to try different things.

Only way to know if it's that good to your ears is to give one a go. G66 have a 30 day return policy and are great to deal with  

Nerine

Had confirmation mine arrives on Monday. 

Really excited to get it. 

If I can make it work, I may say goodbye to a lot of gear that is pending redundancy. 

mrkb

G66 have stated they’ll soon be able to ship to order ie have stock for people not on current waitlist. Looks promising!

DavusPG

Mine arrived yesterday, not had a great deal of time with it, but initial impressions are good. 

Build quality is rock solid, and unsurprisingly it sounds exactly the same as my AxeFx3.

Only difference/compromise is how much I can fit into a preset. With the processing power of the 3 you can have practically any and everything in a preset and I'd definitely got into a habit of putting effects in there "just in case" but never actually using them in several years of rehearsals and gigs. Consequently a few of my presets were maxed out when I opened them on the FM9 and needed paring back to get them within 80% but that was all achievable without losing any of the sounds that I regularly or realistically would want to use, it just meant being a little more considered about what goes into the grid: In the past rather than using channels (of which there are 4 per block) my method was to just add another block, which although a quick fix, also eats processing power

All in all it's a keeper and will be getting its first outing at our gig on Saturday night. I'll report back after that

mrkb

Heres a FM9 Turbo FW3 CPU usage summary that I put together to allow me to maximums/optimise what I carried over from my previous presets - might be useful.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10n3b6CoPaflEMRCxkC14DA06UeF2KRZIIwx2QpgWItE/edit?usp=sharing

Nerine

Delivered today. 

Will defo post up some thoughts when I’ve had some time with it. 

Nerine

Me, the valve amp Luddite, has finally got to spend a couple of hours with it this evening. 

I have just dabbled in some random presets and whatnot.

(FM9 Edit is a joy to use, by the way. Superb accompanying software.)

My main overarching comment whilst doing all this was “FUCK OFFFFFF!!!”



I own a Kemper. I’ve borrowed and gigged with a Quad Cortex, Ive spent some time with the Helix.

All three are good units, but all have left me underwhelmed for various reasons.

This is the first time I have played through a Fractal product, and for me, the FM9 is in a completely different league to the above. 

It’s the real deal. I’ve only tried it through my Genelec monitors in my mix room at this point, but fucking hell… 

The sound and feel of this thing is head and shoulders above the rest in my opinion. 

I know it’s sooooo cliched, but it sounds “right”. 

It responds how you’d expect a valve amp to, cleans up properly, reacts properly. The fuzzes are superb and mirror my real life experiences with their analogue counterparts, the Fx are just stupidly good. I could (and will in a separate thread most likely) wax lyrical for paragraphs. 

There were a couple of absolutely stunning presets I recall. Shiver and AC20 Deluxe, I think. I dicked around with those for a bit and thought they were jaw dropping when switching in some drives and stuff. Some of the song apeing presets floored me. 

I am beyond impressed. In fact, I am absolutely staggered at what the thing is going to be capable of when I’ve got it dialled in for my use cases. 

It’s going to be used for just about everything, I think. 

Tomorrow I’m going to try the FOH/Amp combination and see what that’s like. I’m also going to try it 4CM to see how the drives behave in front of a real preamp, and also just straight into the FX Return of my Small Box without cab sims. The possibilities are pretty endless. 

I’ve never been as impressed in the first few hours of gear ownership as I have been with this. 

Wow… 

Just wow…

Ive always been slightly skeptical of digital guitar gear, but that’s just been completely unravelled. 

I feel like I may end up on the dark side. Rehearsal tomorrow night so I’ll post up some thoughts with how I ran it and what it went like. 

mrkb

^ yeah, but do you like it

agreed Fractal firmware is superb, way better than Atomic and line6 products I’ve had is the past.

DavusPG

@Nerine glad you like it. 

Please feedback after your rehearsal. For me the biggest learning curve with Fractal gear was finding sounds that sit right in the mix with a band that had another guitarist. I found that IR choice was a huge part of it and the other key thing was forgetting what would likely have worked with a real amp and being as aggressive as it took with bass, mid, treble and further EQ adjustments. The EQ on Output 1 is an easy way to tweak all presets at once without altering the presets themselves

I gigged with mine on Saturday and all was good except a few levels which was down to me not converting them to FM9 presets I think. So easy to fix on the fly with all controls at your feet though. 4CM with my tube amp was as silent as it is with the AxeFx3 but as the draw of the FM9 was the ability to streamline things, the tube amp will be staying at home from now on as the difference in sound is negligible at best.

octatonic

March said:

A friend of mine has just got his FM9 and is already singing its praises. He already has a Helix Floor and a Kemper, but says that the FM9 is usable straight out of the box, no tweaking necessary.

I agree.

It is also acoustically quieter than the Axe FX III so no problem having it in the control room.

mrkb

G66 UK now shipping to people who only joined the waitlist last month!

Nerine

Regarding the presets, agreed. They’re all very usable, and really sound great. Would sit in mixes really well. The production based patches towards the end of the preset library are awesome, too. 

I’ve decided against using it for rehearsal this evening just simply down to not having enough time with it yet and we have a dep drummer at rehearsal tonight for Saturdays gig so need to be as time efficient as possible, but I used it in a FOH and amp setting today at home and it works great. 

Having the volume knobs on the top to control the volume to each output is really nice. Easy to get a blend. 

I also dicked around with the IR loader. Very easy. 

Sounded awesome straight into the FX return of my Friedman, sans cab sims, too. 

Started to build a digital version of my actual rig (still need to make a custom layout, though hence not using it for rehearsal tonight as I haven’t had time to get the switching sorted) and it all seems eerily similar and familiar. 

Impressive. Very impressive. 

DavusPG

What is your actual rig?

Nerine

DavusPG said:

What is your actual rig?

Friedman Small Box and a pedal board with various boosts/fuzz/pitch etc in front, delays and reverb in the loop etc. 

Nerine

Continued with the digital recreation of my pedalboard today. 

Was worried that I wouldn’t have enough switches so decided to piss about with the layouts. 

I like to be able to switch some settings on my analogue board for different songs etc.

How to accomplish this?? 

Well, you just use the press and hold feature of the switches. 

For example, my pitch block at a press turns on the virtual capo so I can Eb it up. But what if I want to use the octave function on my virtual Digitech Drop pedal where I would usually turn the knob on the actual unit between songs? Set up channel B of the pitch block to the desired sound and set the hold function of its corresponding switch in the layouts to change to the channel B (octave) setting instead. You can then switch that in and out as you wish. If you want to go back to the other function (in my case Eb mode) you just press and hold to change it back. What’s great is that it remembers what channel you’re on and brings that channel in and out until you press and hold it again to revert back to the previous sound.  

It’s absolutely brilliant. 

I’ve also got two reverbs set up. My standard one, and then press and hold for a more ambient one for a couple of songs. 

My delay tap tempo switch doubles up as a tuner if you hold it down. 

Effectively gives you 18 stomp boxes on the floor in front of you. 

Then you can use the shortcut to get back to the layout menu and access scenes etc. 
On my scenes menu on the floor I have a “per preset” layout switch which takes me back to being able to switch in everything manually. 

It’s bloody genius. 

Hopefully those that have one have played around with this. It’s so good. 

Like you can have effectively a triple layered board. (In reality it’s actually more than this). 

1 layer acts like a preset switcher a la Gigrig G3 or Boss ES8 etc, then you can tap to access the layer underneath allowing you to turn individual effects on and off, then you can press and hold switches in that menu to change the channels and therefore the effect settings for each block and switch those in and out as you see fit. 

So switcher layout, individual stomp layout and alternative individual stomp layout. 

It surprises me every time I plug into it.  

Killer. 

Also. Fuck it sounds good.  

fretmeister

I love the flexibility of modern modellers.

Being able to footswitch to different settings within a pedal is just amazing.