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Knobs and patches

Put the four controls you actually play in front of you, hide the two hundred you do not, and save the result as something you can re-use.

The problem with plugin UIs

A serious amp sim exposes a hundred parameters or more. Perhaps six of them are things you touch between songs, and two are things you touch during one. The rest are setup: they matter once, and then they are noise in front of you for the rest of the gig.

Plectrify’s answer is that a module starts empty. Nothing is surfaced until you say so.

Mapping a knob

Open a module’s mapping view and choose a parameter from the plugin. It becomes a control on the module card, and you choose what kind:

  • Knob — a continuous value: gain, tone, mix.
  • Switch — an on/off or a small set of positions: bright, boost, cab on/off.
  • Meter — read-only, for something the plugin reports rather than something you set: gain reduction, output level.

Then make it yours. Rename it — the plugin’s Param 47 can simply be Grit. Give the module a title and an accent colour, so the amp is unmistakably the amp when you glance at the rack mid-song.

Mapped knobs and the plugin’s own editor stay in sync in both directions. Turn a dial in the plugin’s window and your mapped knob follows it, because the app polls the plugin’s parameters continuously rather than assuming it is the only one changing them.

Patches

Once a layout is good, save it as a patch. A patch holds:

  1. Its name.
  2. The plugin it was built for.
  3. The knob mapping — which parameters, as which control type, under which labels.
  4. The module’s look — the title override and accent colour, because those are half of what makes a module recognisable.
  5. The plugin’s own full tone, captured as that plugin’s state.

Apply a patch to any module hosting the same plugin and you get all of it back: the layout and the sound.

A patch saved without a tone — some are shipped that way deliberately — applies its mapping alone and leaves whatever tone the module already had. That is genuinely useful: one good mapping for your favourite amp sim, re-usable across a dozen different sounds.

Installed patch packs

Some patches arrive with the app rather than from you. They install through the Packages panel, and they may carry their own assets — a capture, an impulse response — that the plugin loads.

Shipped patches are read only. They show a Pack badge, and they cannot be renamed, edited or deleted. Making an editable version is the ordinary path and takes one step: load the patch, then save the module under a new name. What you get is a fresh capture of the live module, which is what you want — it includes anything you changed after loading.

Tones downloaded from TONE3000

A capture taken from TONE3000 is saved as an ordinary patch too — same list, same menu, recalled by a rig the same way. It arrives with its knobs already mapped and with its creator’s name and licence attached. See Tones from TONE3000.

Why a patch is not a preset

A plugin’s own preset is that plugin’s tone, in that plugin’s format, and it says nothing about how you want to play the thing. A patch is the tone plus the interface you built for it. That is why applying one changes the module card in front of you, not just the sound coming out of it.

Patches were called presets in earlier versions. Anything you saved under the old name is migrated automatically the first time you launch a version that uses the new one — nothing to do and nothing lost.