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 → pedals → amp → pedals → cab → pedals → output

The pedalboard is the top row, and it's the whole signal path: three zones of pedals with an AMP and a CAB marker between them, marking where those two fixed stages sit. The amp and cab controls themselves live on the row below, each one colour-matched to its marker above, so you can see at a glance which is which.

Each pedal 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, or across the AMP and CAB markers to move them between zones. The chain ramps down and back over about 12 ms while it rewires, so the change is click-free rather than instant.

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

Each zone of the pedalboard has its own plus button, and it opens the pedal browser. There are 24 types, grouped by what they do to the signal. All of them are free.

There's a search box at the top: typing oct gets you to the Octave faster than scanning, and it matches the two-letter badge too, so ts finds the Screamer.

A pedal's colour tells you its family, not which pedal it is. Everything in Drive is warm orange, everything in Modulation is cyan, Time and space is blue, and so on. So you can pick the drive out of a full board at a glance. The two-letter badge in each pedal's header is what identifies the individual pedal, and no two share one.

Dynamics

• Noise 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.
• Swell. Removes the pick attack entirely, so each note fades in like a bowed string. Attack sets how long the fade takes; Sens sets how readily it re-arms for the next note.

Drive

• Screamer. The classic mid-focused drive, and the one to reach for in front of a high-gain amp. Its job is to tighten, not to distort: bass bypasses the clipper entirely, so the low end stays firm while the mids do the work. The Bass knob moves that split: up around 720 Hz it's a tight 808, wound down toward 100 Hz it becomes a full-range, fuller drive. With Drive all the way down it's a clean mid-boost.
• Overdrive. Soft saturation with tone shaping. Push the amp's input. Smoother and warmer than Fuzz, and unlike the Screamer it drives the whole signal, which is a rounder, looser sound.
• Fuzz. Aggressive asymmetric clipping for the classic 60s / 90s fuzz character. Strong even harmonics give it the iconic octave-up thickness.

EQ

• EQ. Three-band, low / mid / high. Bipolar ±12 dB centred. A quick tone shape rather than a surgical tool.
• Graphic EQ. Six fixed bands an octave apart from 100 Hz to 3.2 kHz, ±12 dB each. This is the one for actual problems: notching a resonant peak, cutting a single fizzy band, or dialling a mid contour that the three-band EQ can't reach.

Filter

• Wah. The manual, expression-driven wah. Pedal is the treadle; bind it to an expression pedal via MIDI learn and it plays like the real thing. The Vocal knob controls how much the resonance sharpens as the pedal opens. That rise is what makes a wah sound like a vowel rather than a filter being swept. At zero it's a plain sweep, which is a useful comparison.
• Auto-Wah. Envelope follower drives a bandpass cutoff. Funk, clavinet, wah-style colours. Sensitivity / Range / Base / Q / Level.

Modulation

• 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.
• Uni-Vibe. Four all-pass stages at unequal frequencies swept by one photocell-shaped LFO. That uneven spacing is what makes it throb where a phaser sweeps. Mix doubles as the original's chorus/vibrato switch: halfway is the throb, fully wet is the pitch wobble.
• Rotary. A rotating speaker cabinet. The horn and bass drum turn at different rates over a crossover, and each one's rotation bends the pitch, swings the level and moves the image at once. Inertia is the control worth knowing: rotors have mass, so a speed change takes a second or two to arrive, and that ramp is most of what makes it convincing.
• Auto-Pan. Sine LFO sweeps a stereo panner L↔R. Doubles as a diagnostic for the master STEREO toggle.
• Doubler. Two differently-delayed, independently-drifting copies hard left and right against a centred dry, for the double-tracked rhythm sound. Unlike Auto-Pan, which moves one guitar around, this makes it sound like there are two of you.

Pitch

• Octave. An octave up (from full-wave rectification, the Octavia trick) and an octave down (a flip-flop divider, as in a Blue Box) blended against the dry signal. This is monophonic by design. It tracks single notes well and gets unpredictable on chords. Every analogue octave pedal behaves this way, and it's part of the sound rather than a fault. Play lines through it, not chords.

Time and space

• Delay. Time, feedback, mix. Clean and digital: every repeat comes back the same as the last.
• Tape Echo. What a tape machine adds that a digital delay doesn't: each pass through the loop is band-limited, gently saturated and slightly off-time, so the repeats get darker and squashier as they go and the echo decays into the mix instead of sitting on top of it. Age sets how worn the tape is; Wow sets how much it drifts.
• Reverb. Tone (dark↔bright) and mix. Convolution-based; ships with seven CC0 IRs (cathedral, bathroom, basement, outdoor, underpass, club, drain pipe).
• Spring Reverb. A modelled three-spring tank, and the guitar reverb: surf, rockabilly, vintage combo drip. Highs leave the tank before lows, so transients smear into the characteristic chirp. Dwell drives the tank (high dwell gives the surf splash) and, unlike the convolution Reverb, Decay is a real knob you can sweep.

Lo-fi

• Lo-Fi. Sample-rate decimation and bit-crushing, deliberately un-filtered so the aliasing comes through. For when you want the guitar to sound broken on purpose.

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.

Tempo sync

Nine pedals can lock to the metronome BPM instead of a hand-set knob: the two delays (Delay, Tape Echo) and every pedal with an LFO (Tremolo, Chorus, Flanger, Phaser, Uni-Vibe, Rotary, Auto-Pan). Hit SYNC on the pedal and pick a note value; the knob locks, and the pedal follows the tempo. It's a Pro feature.

The note value means the same thing on both kinds, which is the point: 1/8 on a delay is an eighth-note repeat, and 1/8 on a tremolo is one full sweep per eighth note. Turn SYNC off and the knob goes back to exactly where you left it.

At fast subdivisions and high tempos an LFO can end up beyond what its knob reaches, a 1/16 flanger at 120 BPM wants 8 Hz and the knob stops at 5. The pedal runs at the correct rate anyway; the knob just sits at its end, and the readout shows what's really happening.

Mix: blending a pedal against your clean signal

The Compressor, the three drives (Screamer, Overdrive, Fuzz), Lo-Fi, Wah and Auto-Wah each have a Mix knob. It sets how much of the pedal you hear against your untouched dry signal, running side by side. Turn it down and both are present at once.

That's how a lot of these pedals are actually used. Parallel compression keeps the peaks a compressor would flatten, so you get the sustain without losing the attack. Parallel drive keeps the clean low end and pick transient underneath the dirt, which is why a fuzz can sound huge instead of thin. Blending Lo-Fi in under a clean signal gives you grit without the breakage.

Mix starts fully wet, so nothing you've already saved sounds different.

The other pedals don't have it, for one of three reasons: they already have their own Mix or Dry control, wired inside the effect where it belongs; blending them just reproduces what another knob already does (a tremolo blended with dry is less depth); or a dry path would defeat them entirely, a Noise Gate or a Swell works by taking something away, and running the untouched signal alongside puts it straight back.

Where a pedal sits: before the amp, in the loop, or after the cab

The board is split into three zones by two markers, AMP and CAB:

[ pre ] → AMP → [ FX loop ] → CAB → [ post ]

Each zone has its own Add button, so you can put a pedal straight into the loop or after the cab. And you can drag a pedal across a marker to move one that's already on the board.

• Pre. In front of the amp, and where most pedals belong. Drives, wah, compressor and gate all work by changing what the amp is fed.
• FX loop. Between the amp and the cab, which is where a hardware rig puts its time effects. A delay here repeats the amp's distorted sound instead of being distorted by it.
• Post. After the cab. The studio position: reverb and delay on the finished, speaker-filtered tone.

This is the difference between a reverb that turns a high-gain preset to mush and one that sits behind it, so it is worth trying. Reverb, Delay, Tape Echo and Spring Reverb are the ones to move. They were designed for the loop or post, and until now every pedal was stuck in front of the amp.

Two things worth knowing so the results aren't surprising:

• Existing presets don't move. Everything you have saved opens with every pedal in pre, exactly as it sounded before.
• A purely tonal pedal sounds the same in the loop as after the cab. The EQ and Graphic EQ are the clear cases: the cab is a filter, and two filters in a row give the same result in either order. Their placement only changes the sound across the AMP marker, because the amp is the non-linear stage. Anything that distorts, compresses or modulates does differ in all three.

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.