Troubleshooting

Change it to FRONT in the I/O menu. It is a setting, not a physical switch, and this catches nearly every new owner.

Every block has two variants, X and Y, not four channels. Channels arrived with the current generation.

Cygnus is current-generation only. There is no upgrade path, and presets do not cross between generations.

XL, XL+ and Mark II use EtherCON with FASLINK. The original Axe-Fx II has a plain Ethernet port. Check which you have before buying cables.

Use a Humbuster cable from the quarter-inch output — TRS at the Axe-Fx, TS at the amp.

Eight scenes per preset, and turning Quick Control knob A on the recall screen changes them without a foot controller.

The XL and XL+ hold 768 presets and 1024 cabs; the original and Mark II hold 384 and 100.

Most of the time it really is a faulty or disconnected cable. Plug headphones straight into the unit: if the preset sounds fine there, the fault is downstream and nothing on the unit needs changing.

A grid can look connected and not be. Check the preset begins with an Input block and ends with an Output block, and that those correspond to the jacks you have actually cabled. Then change each block to a shunt in turn, leaving the Amp and Cab until last, and listen for where the sound returns.

If something is assigned to a volume or level control and the pedal or switch it expects is not plugged in, the level sits wherever that missing controller says — usually silence. Either remove the modifier, or set the external controller's initial value to 100% instead of 0%.

Presets you downloaded often reference a cab IR that lives on the author's unit and not yours. Point the Cab block at a factory cab and the sound comes back.

Reboot first. If that does not do it, disconnect MIDI, USB and the foot controller, then hold RECALL while powering on. The unit comes up on an empty preset, which does not touch anything you have saved.

Check the CONFIG page of the Global menu. These are global switches, which is why the change hits every preset at once rather than one.

If it is a single preset rather than all of them, check that the Amp block's SAG has not been turned fully counter-clockwise. The Global Graphic EQ is the other thing worth a look.

That specific hollow, flanged quality is the sound of stereo collapsing. Check OUTPUT 1 MODE and OUTPUT 2 MODE on the AUDIO page of the I/O menu against how you are actually listening. Headphones will confirm it in seconds.

That is exactly what those two LEDs are for. Bring down your preset levels, or reduce the global BOOST/PAD for whichever output is complaining. At a gig, the GAIN on the Global Graphic EQ will do it in one move.

Undo it — turn the value wheel back the other way. Otherwise navigate around the message and remove a block, or load a different preset. Setting the CAB block to MONO LO-RES frees a useful amount and often solves it outright.

Once anything is attached to a block's BYPASS MODE modifier slot, that modifier has total control and the switch stops mattering. Either use the modifier to change the state, or remove it.

Change MAIN INPUT SELECT from USB to ANALOG (IN 1) and you can play along with the computer instead of processing it.

A preset is a list of settings, and those settings are interpreted by whatever firmware is running. The usual culprits are a firmware version change, a different guitar, a different amp at the other end, or external controllers sitting at different values than they were. Global Blocks that have since been edited will also change every preset that references them.

Axe-Fx II presets do not load on an Axe-Fx III, an FM9 or an FM3, and theirs do not load here. The models themselves largely carry over, though, so transferring settings by hand generally lands where you expect — and the Axe-Fx II's factory cabs live in the Legacy bank on the newer units.