There's some unusual stuff I had to do in order to get Axe-Fx III support working. If you do a little digging in the default settings, you will see some of it. I figured I should write this down somewhere for those who need it or who are simply curious.
"FAKE CCs"
The Axe-Fx III is actually being controlled by Sysex messages sent from the GT. However, the GT is really designed to work with CCs - the built in device database only uses CC numbers, for example. What's worse, the Axe-Fx III ships without any CC numbers predefined at all. Using CCs would require you to go in and manually set all of them in the Axe-Fx. The way I got around it is to use fake CC numbers, which are translated by the software into Sysex messages behind the scenes. This allows you to continue using the typical Assign CCs and Set Default Buttons features in the GT without so much configuration needed on the Axe-Fx.
CC values are also a bit different than normal. In addition to value 0 for bypass and value 127 for active, there are values that select the effect channel:
Value 0: Bypass effect block
Value 1: Select channel A
Value 2: Select channel B
Value 3: Select channel C
Value 4: Select channel D
Value 127: Enable effect block
This allows us to use one CC number that can select effect state and channel.
If you look at the default settings, you can see examples of how all of this works.
GET PRESET NAMES / SCENES
When you do a Get Preset Names and have Get Scenes turned on, the following things will happen:
There's a lot of confusion on how this works, because this is such a departure from the way it worked with the Axe-Fx II. The current plan is to keep this method as an option, but also have another option that follows the previous approach - no songs are used, preset buttons select Axe-Fx presets and there are separate scene select buttons that select Axe-Fx scenes.
"FAKE CCs"
The Axe-Fx III is actually being controlled by Sysex messages sent from the GT. However, the GT is really designed to work with CCs - the built in device database only uses CC numbers, for example. What's worse, the Axe-Fx III ships without any CC numbers predefined at all. Using CCs would require you to go in and manually set all of them in the Axe-Fx. The way I got around it is to use fake CC numbers, which are translated by the software into Sysex messages behind the scenes. This allows you to continue using the typical Assign CCs and Set Default Buttons features in the GT without so much configuration needed on the Axe-Fx.
CC values are also a bit different than normal. In addition to value 0 for bypass and value 127 for active, there are values that select the effect channel:
Value 0: Bypass effect block
Value 1: Select channel A
Value 2: Select channel B
Value 3: Select channel C
Value 4: Select channel D
Value 127: Enable effect block
This allows us to use one CC number that can select effect state and channel.
If you look at the default settings, you can see examples of how all of this works.
GET PRESET NAMES / SCENES
When you do a Get Preset Names and have Get Scenes turned on, the following things will happen:
- The GT will switch into song and setlist mode
- Each selected Axe-Fx preset name will be written to a GT song
- Scenes within each Axe-Fx preset will have their names written into GT presets. (This can be anywhere from 1 to 8 scenes per Axe-Fx preset, which you can choose using the Scenes / Song parameter)
- Each GT preset will be assigned to the appropriate GT song
- Each GT preset will have a preset action assigned to it that sends the appropriate scene select message to the Axe-Fx
There's a lot of confusion on how this works, because this is such a departure from the way it worked with the Axe-Fx II. The current plan is to keep this method as an option, but also have another option that follows the previous approach - no songs are used, preset buttons select Axe-Fx presets and there are separate scene select buttons that select Axe-Fx scenes.
