Building your first preset

A preset in Axion is the entire state of your rig captured under a name — every pedal in the chain, every parameter on the amp, the cab IR, the master level. Load a preset and you're hearing exactly what its author heard. This guide walks through assembling one from scratch.

The signal chain

Audio flows left to right, top to bottom:

input → pedalboard → amp → cab → output

Each pedal in the pedalboard is a discrete node. The order matters — a delay before drive sounds entirely different to a delay after, and a noise gate at the start of the chain saves the rest of the signal path from amplifying your interface's noise floor. Drag pedals to reorder them in real time; the audio doesn't drop.

NOTE The chain runs at sample rate, sample-by-sample, all in one AudioWorklet block. There's no "render" step and no offline buffer — what you hear is the live signal.

Adding pedals

The plus button at the right of the pedalboard opens the pedal browser. There are 13 types:

• Gate — open the chain when you play, close it when you don't. First in the chain by default; doubles as a second-stage gate after high-gain amps if you add a second instance.
• Compressor — threshold / ratio / attack / release / makeup level. Evens out picking dynamics; essential for clean rhythm, country / funk picking, and lead sustain.
• Overdrive — soft saturation with tone shaping. Push the amp's input. Smoother and warmer than Fuzz.
• Fuzz — aggressive asymmetric clipping for the classic 60s / 90s fuzz character. Strong even harmonics give it the iconic octave-up thickness.
• EQ — three-band, low / mid / high. Bipolar ±12 dB centred.
• Auto-Wah — envelope follower drives a bandpass cutoff. Funk, clavinet, wah-style colours. Sensitivity / Range / Base / Q / Level.
• Tremolo — sine LFO modulating the output gain. Surf, country, psych-rock flavour.
• Chorus — modulated short delay summed with dry; thick detune character.
• Flanger — modulated very-short delay with feedback; jet-engine comb sweep.
• Phaser — four cascaded all-pass filters with shared LFO modulation; metallic notch sweep.
• Delay — time, feedback, mix. Pro users get tempo sync to the metronome BPM.
• Reverb — tone (dark↔bright) and mix. Convolution-based; ships with seven CC0 IRs (cathedral, bathroom, basement, outdoor, underpass, club, drain pipe).
• Auto-Pan — sine LFO sweeps a stereo panner L↔R. Doubles as a diagnostic for the master STEREO toggle.

Tap a pedal to add it; it appears at the end of the chain. To bypass it, click the footswitch (or press the number key for its position — see the hotkey reference). To remove it, drag it off the board or click the × in its header.

Tweaking the amp

The amp section is split into two halves: the source (left) and the controls (right).

The source toggle picks between the analytical amp (clean / crunch / high-gain voicings — runs as Rust DSP in a worklet) and a NAM model (free — see Loading a NAM model). Both produce a stereo signal that feeds the cab.

The control knobs are universal:

• Gain — preamp drive.
• Bass / Mid / Treble — tonestack.
• Presence — upper-midrange shimmer.
• Master — output level into the cab.

If a NAM is loaded, the analytical voicing's knobs stay visible — they still drive the analytical fallback that listeners hear when you share this preset and they don't have the capture, so they're worth setting even when you're playing the NAM.

The cab section

The cab applies an impulse-response convolution. Axion ships with six bundled IRs (mic'd 1×12, 2×12, 4×12 cabs in mixed positions) plus a separate reverb IR for the reverb pedal.

You can A/B IRs without touching the rest of the rig — useful when a tone is almost right but feels small or boxy.

Pro users can upload their own cab IR (wav file, up to 5 seconds, mono or stereo, any sample rate — Axion resamples on load). Uploads are content-addressed in IndexedDB and reference-counted across presets; deleting an IR that a preset depends on prompts before completing.

Saving the preset

Press ⌘/Ctrl + S (or click the Save chip in the preset bar) once you're happy. If the current preset is a factory preset, Axion automatically falls through to Save as… so you don't accidentally overwrite a shipped tone.

Presets live in IndexedDB on your machine — no account needed, no upload. Use JSON export (preset bar overflow menu) to back them up or move them between browsers. The exported JSON is portable; the import button on the same menu drops them straight back in.

To share a preset publicly so other players can load it in their browser, see Sharing a preset. That's a separate concept from local save — sharing publishes the preset; saving keeps it on your machine.

Recall and switch

Keyboard navigation:

• [ and ] — previous / next preset in the combined list (your saves + factory).
• F1 – F12 — load the preset bound to that key (Pro; configure in the key-bindings panel).
• 1 – 9 — toggle bypass on the pedal at that chain position. Universal across all presets.

The Pro F-key bindings are global, not per-preset — they're how live performers switch between tones mid-song. Bindings persist in IndexedDB; if your Pro licence lapses they stay there (your data, your keep) but stop firing until Pro is restored.

A workflow that holds up

A pattern that survives once you start writing more than three presets:

1. Build the base tone with one or two pedals max. Get the amp and cab honest first.
2. Add modulation and time effects last — they're easy to over-mix when the dry signal isn't dialled.
3. Save early, save often — the engine never auto-saves your rig changes between presets.
4. Name presets by intent (solo-warm, clean-verbed-pads), not by gear (twin-reverb-3). You'll remember intent in a year; you won't remember which amp was on the third try.