BossAreaForum

I'm on my 3rd Boss multi-fx pedal, having owned a BE-5 and an ME-70. The ME-80 is the best yet. And although I've had it for 5 months now, and am slowly building up banks of presets, I'm finding it laborious to get it doing what I want.

For example, to get some decent amp simulations, extra preamp gain and distortion pedal, with and without compressor, I have assigned 3 presets, each with CTL activating the compressor. If I need to activate any of the other pedals, I can't unless I go manual.

Also, if I decide to use a different preamp model or distortion pedal, the "default" 12 o'clock settings are usually no good and need tweaking. But each preamp's best settings are different, requiring either a lot of messing around with EQ, or back to the inflexible memory mode.

It seems to me, to be able to have decent settings by default on each pedal position, they have to be saved as a preset. And if you want to cover several combinations of effects, you have to save a preset for each combination (apart from one variation, available with the CTL pedal).

I hope I'm making sense.

At least when I had the ME-70 it had "EZ-Tone" defaults for each effect - though you couldn't actually customise them, as far as I remember.

Am I asking the impossible? How do people work around these issues? Would I be better trading it in for something else, to do what I want?

in general, I think the intended point of the BOSS multi systems is that you have 1 patch per 1 song and enter manual mode to be used as a normal dedicated pedalboard. That's the best I've come up with anyways. I like the GT pedals , I have a basic patch I could hypothetically use for an entire setlist and then a few alternate patches for certain songs that really would benefit from different amp sims and totally different effect choices reverb settings etc. hope that helps!

chromandre wrote: ↑

Thu Mar 19, 2020 6:12 pm

in general, I think the intended point of the BOSS multi systems is that you have 1 patch per 1 song and enter manual mode to be used as a normal dedicated pedalboard. That's the best I've come up with anyways.

That's how I use my MS-3 as well, except for the Schism settings on bass (because I'd have to press 3 pedals footswitches at once to disengage the flanger, engage the whammy and play the whammy). Can the ME-80 be programmed that way though? I had a ME-50B back then and it didn't seem to work the same way as the new digital ones (GT-100, GT-1(B) and MS-3)

When I play guitar with it, I usually have one bank per song and switch to manual mode so I get the effects I want. I try to keep them in the same order not to get confused (Distorsion/OD, Modulation, Delay, Wah).

Gasgano wrote: ↑

Fri Mar 20, 2020 12:26 pm

chromandre wrote: ↑

Thu Mar 19, 2020 6:12 pm

in general, I think the intended point of the BOSS multi systems is that you have 1 patch per 1 song and enter manual mode to be used as a normal dedicated pedalboard. That's the best I've come up with anyways.

That's how I use my MS-3 as well, except for the Schism settings on bass (because I'd have to press 3 pedals footswitches at once to disengage the flanger, engage the whammy and play the whammy). Can the ME-80 be programmed that way though? I had a ME-50B back then and it didn't seem to work the same way as the new digital ones (GT-100, GT-1(B) and MS-3)

When I play guitar with it, I usually have one bank per song and switch to manual mode so I get the effects I want. I try to keep them in the same order not to get confused (Distorsion/OD, Modulation, Delay, Wah).

yeah I think the ME-80 actually does do this! You get patches, banks, manual mode, and then the CTL pedal can be assigned to engage multiple effects /change settings. can't comment on the difficult behind actually programming this function but they did add it.