Alesis Fusion: Ultimate Heavy Metal Guitar FX

Upon plugging my guitar into the Alesis Fusion, I always wondered how to use it as a guitar fx processor. The fusion includes 8 inputs, and a variety of FX. Unfortunately it only lets you use bus effects on the audio inputs, which gets rid of all of the amp modeling, and overdrives by themselves. To get a great heavy metal sound from your guitar and alesis fusion, you will have to stretch the use of the bus effects without clipping and overloading it (which is easy to do). Here is a great patch that lets you use the Alesis fusion as heavy metal guitar FX processor.


Step 1. Create an audio track
Step 2. The fx bus settings:

Bus Send 1 = Wah Distortion + Delay @ 99%
Dry Level 0%
Bus Return 10%
Time: 0.1ms
Feedback, Attack, Release, Sensotivity, all @ 0%
Drive: 100%

Bus Send 2 = Plate Reverb @ 71% (Optional)
Dry Level 0%
Bus Return 9%
Decay, Diffusion 100%
Density 35%
Damping 30%

Be careful when setting this up as you will likely clip the internal circuit or your speakers if all the settings aren't in yet. Pay attention to bus return levels.

Step 4. Plug your guitar into the Alesis Fusion's audio in OR through an external amp FIRST (recommended).

Here are the settings on my practice amp which leads into the Alesis Fusion via Headphone-Out:
Input Gain 100%
Treble 100%
Mids: variable (50%)
Bass: 100%
Overdrive: ON
Adjust the output volume accordingly

After all this setup you will get a live guitar FX processor out of the Alesis fusion, and a patch that sounds AWESOME.
Its like Overdrived Metal-Wah from hell. Great for solos and some chords.

Acid Sans TB-303 by D. Ager

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If you've ever looked through guitar community forum posts you'll come across the topic of which wood sounds better. A lot of people have been saying that it makes no difference, while expert ears stand by their claim that the type of wood does. Well a new study has shown that wood density does affect the sound quality! Since the study was done on the violin, an instrument with a resonating cavity, it could be applied to acoustic guitar. I'm willing to take the leap forward and say it does have some affect on the sound quality of a solid body electric guitar. So density does affect sound performance!

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