The one thing
Level-match your presets at home, and set up your layouts or scenes before you leave. Everything else here is recoverable at soundcheck; those two are not.
Before you leave
Level-match every preset you plan to use against every other one. A preset 4 dB louder than the rest is the fastest way to lose an engineer's goodwill and cannot be fixed from the front of house.
Back up. Firmware updates exist and neither they nor a factory reset asks twice.
When you arrive
- Balanced outputs to the desk. Ask whether they want mono before you hand over two cables.
- If there is hum into your amp, reach for a Humbuster cable before a DI box. On the XLR side, use the ground lift.
- Check which layout or scene you are in. A switch doing the wrong thing is nearly always this.
- Confirm the guitar is in Input 1 and not a line input.
Things that look like faults and are not
A gap when you change preset. That is a preset change reloading the grid — build the change as a scene instead.
A footswitch doing something different from yesterday. That is a different layout.
Part of the chain passing no signal. That is usually a missing shunt.
Troubleshooting →