I want to report briefly on my first experience playing out with AT5. If my problem is that I'm doing something wrong, please point that out. Also, I know the difference between a bug and a feature that I would like to have, but I'm just relating issues I had today. OK, here goes.
First the good: the band at church was impressed with my tone. AT5 passes with flying colors. Really, I can't say enough about how good it sounds. I was able to program presets with exactly the variety of tones needed for the different songs. Programming a perfect clean tone and dirty tone for different parts of the same song produced just what was needed. I then put them in the set list order in the first several slots of presets and I'm ready to go. AT5 is utterly awesome
(Note: I love the live interface, where the presets are listed in the main window in order that can be scrolled, but how do you get it back after it goes away?)
Now for the problems.
1) No global volume. Does anyone have advice for a quick way to level the volume between presets? It would be nice if there were a global volume setting that would do this at the final output, so that it wouldn't be necessary to fiddle with different volume settings for each preset.
2) Unable to program midi bypass for rack gear, without editing the effect. This is a real problem when an effect doesn't have a bypass switch. There was a preset that was already perfect for one of the songs, but I needed to be able to switch off and on the delay. That I couldn't do so, meant I couldn't use it. I don't want to use up two preset slots to have this function.
3) Cumbersome midi stomp control setup. Rehearsal was going along fine, when I decided I needed to load a volume pedal in stomp slot 1 for one of the presets. That caused the other stomps to move over one slot and suddenly I had to make each stomp relearn its midi bypass setting. Why not have each stomp remember this, regardless of which slot it is in? Since we can no longer set stomp slots to midi in global settings, we have to program each stomp box individually anyway. At least we shouldn't have to redo it every time we move one. And bring back global midi control for stomp slots!
4) AT5 crashed when learning midi bypass. When I was making the volume pedal learn midi for bypass, no problem. But when I had it learn pedal for the FBC 1010, AT5 crashed. I mean it didn't freeze, it just crashed, shut down and disappeared from my screen. Meanwhile, the band starts playing and I'm supposed to come in with lead, but I'm in a panic imagining a disaster. I reopened AT5 and all my presets were there, just right. But there was no communication with midi. Not at all. After running through the possibilities I found that the AXE I/O was not seeing the FBC1010, though it showed up in the midi settings. Using the UNO software, I discovered that the PC was not seeing the FBC1010. I rebooted. (Thank God for SSD).
This was the end of our rehearsal and the church service was to start in about 25 minutes and I'm dead in the water. I started AT5 - still no go. I checked FBC1010 set up and found that I needed to reset midi in and out and reload the mapping file for midi to AT5. AT5 would now respond to midi commands, but I had to do relearn again for my stomps in presets that I had already saved.
So I wonder what caused AT5 to crash. Was it the FBC1010? I used that unit for a couple of years with AT4 and never once had a crash or any other kind of glitch. It seems to me that AT5 is not quite as stable as it needs to be. Or something.
Anyway, the last thing I need is having my rig crash in the middle of a live performance. I want to use AT5 as my go to live rig. Let's hope this gets worked out.
My rig: AT5, AXE I/O, Behringer FBC 1010w/ Uno, Windows 10 (20H2) Pro, AMD Ryzen 7 3700U, 24 GB RAM
