Presets and playing live
Four sounds under your feet, the switching gap, MIDI, and a pre-flight checklist for the gig.
Combine rather than multiply. Four well-chosen presets cover a set — or add a MIDI controller and treat the pedal as a sound module.
Four presets, sixty-four slots
There are 64 presets. Four are reachable by foot: IA and IB on Footswitch I, IIA and IIB on Footswitch II. The rest live under All Presets and need MIDI.
The BANK button does not help. It cycles capture banks, not preset banks, and it’s a hand control. This is the highest-recurrence complaint about the device by a wide margin.
Two modes exist. 4-Preset Mode is the factory default and works as described. Switching to 2-Preset Mode makes Footswitch I toggle A and B, and turns Footswitch II into a global bypass.
Combine, don’t multiply
The strategy that actually works with four presets is to stop thinking in amps and start thinking in songs. Clean, crunch, lead, and lead-with-delay will get you through a whole set.
Neural DSP staff have argued the constraint is a virtue — that it forces you to rely on your dynamics and your playing rather than on switching. That’s partly self-serving and partly true.
The switching gap
Changing preset produces roughly 60 ms of silence. This was introduced deliberately in NanOS 2.0.0 as the cost of the flexible signal chain — switching was gapless at launch, and rollback requests have been declined.
Delay and reverb trails do continue across the change, which helps. Community opinion is genuinely split: some call it a live deal-breaker, others on recent firmware find it unnoticeable in a band mix.
- Keep the modulation, delay and reverb identical across all four presets. Several owners report this makes the gap effectively inaudible.
- Better still, don’t change preset mid-song. Use an expression pedal or MIDI CC, neither of which is a preset change, so neither has a gap.
Solo boosts
There’s no dedicated boost, which is a real weak point. The community’s clearest answer is to map per-preset capture volume to an expression pedal — gapless, and continuously variable.
The alternative is to mirror your lead preset into the adjacent slot with a higher capture volume, so one tap boosts. That costs you a preset slot out of four, which is expensive.
MIDI, if you gig regularly
A MIDI foot controller over TRS Type A unlocks all 64 presets, mapped automatically to Program Change 0–63. Neural DSP staff have endorsed the Nektar Pacer, Morningstar MC6, Behringer FCB1010, Harley Benton MP-100 and Fortin Hydra. Owners also favour the Morningstar MC3, Luminite Graviton M1/M2 and the M-Wave Chocolate.
Set the EXP/MIDI port to MIDI mode in the app first, or nothing will happen and you’ll assume the cable is wrong.
There is a confirmed bug with MIDI over the TRS port: the cab and capture blocks mishandle certain incoming CCs and the CAB/IR block can randomly disengage mid-rehearsal. Neural DSP support has acknowledged it with a fix planned and no date. The workaround is MIDI over USB-C, which costs you the audio-interface use of that port.
Forum: CAB/IR block randomly switching offGig pre-flight
The failure modes for this device are well documented as complaints and nowhere documented as a checklist. Here’s the checklist.
- 01Firmware at 2.2.1 or later — 2.2.0 could fail to boot with an expression or MIDI pedal connected.
- 02Take a cloud backup. You get five slots.
- 03Power from the DC jack with a regulated 600 mA-plus supply. Never USB at a gig.
- 04Balanced TRS out, into a DI box if the run is long. That also buys you a second ground lift.
- 05Level-match all four presets at gig volume, not bedroom volume.
- 06Identical post-effects across presets, to bury the switching gap.
- 07Parameter Lock on — hold EXIT for three seconds — so nothing moves if you kick it.
- 08Turn LED brightness up. The legibility complaint about this device is daylight, not dark stages.
- 09Pre-sync everything in the app while you have signal, then plan not to need the phone at all.
- 10Learn your preset positions by feel. There’s no screen to check.