What you actually bought
What this box is for, which generation it belongs to, and the one sentence that explains most of the confusion around it.
01 · 4 min
A whole guitar rig in one box, built by dropping blocks onto a grid and wiring them together. Whether it sounds right depends almost entirely on what you plug it into.
The short version
A rackmount processor built around a 14x6 stereo grid, with two amp and cab pairs per preset, eight scenes, and four independent channels inside every block. Extremely deep and, unusually for its class, driven from a front panel rather than from footswitches — those are a separate purchase.
Is this the right guide?
If yours is a floorboard with nine switches it is an FM9; with three, an FM3. If it uses X and Y rather than channels A to D, it is an Axe-Fx II, a different generation running Ares rather than Cygnus.
The thing everyone gets wrong first
On a Axe-Fx III, the question we see most is expecting footswitches in the box.
There are none. The Axe-Fx III is driven from its front panel until you add an FC controller.