Fender Micro Plus as a pedal platform ? Hell yeah!

Of late I have been experimenting quite a bit with two headphone Amps, the BOSS Katana Go ( now discontinued) and as of last week I brought home the new Fender Mustang Micro Plus.
A lot of you may look at these as purely headphone amps that you jack into the guitar and listen in purely with headphones.
My usage goes entirely the other way around, I see these little dongles more simply as a series of programmable blocks pretty much like you would an hxstomp, only here you can manipulate everything wirelessly with their included apps.
Now, for me these things are great, but like anything else I prefer to have a lot of extras. Pedals in front to give you better gain staging, and in some cases stereo pedals behind the rather limited set of delays and reverbs.
More on the tail end in another video. Today we are looking at a selection of midi controllable Overdrives that I find pair particularly well.
Both the Mathews Effects Architect V4 and the JET Pedals Lamb Drive.
I know both these builders fairly well, they both make phenomenal midi controllers on their own and their pedals obviously bring a lot of cool midi tricks to the workbench.
The cool thing here with midi controlled pedals is that you can preprogram a lot of options and pretty much let your iPad drive em on their own. You have a lot of freedom with extra boosts and EQ stages which the headphone amps will not offer.
Another thing to consider here is you've got wireless freedom in a rig like this, they are very low in power consumption so paired with a headphone amp on your board you can pretty much throw this board on an amp or desk or couch and go chill with your iPad to run things.
So my findings with the Micro Plus??
Big winner here is the super simple interaction with the Fender Tone app. On an iPad screen the knobs and controls all work well and you have a lot of power.
Those are the pros I guess.
The Cons? The micro plus in my view would seriously benefit from some midi hooks being added into the app. You have 100 presets sitting in front of you and an eternity of scrolling to find the one you want. The screen could be better organized here by using two or 3 columns or adding a minor graphic to show what's in the preset itself . If you did have the ability to jump to a preset directly or toggle effects or remote a few more parameters this thing would truly rock.
The discontinued Katana Go can now do all that as third parties have been able to open it up to serious midi control.
Hopefully Fender will do a few updates to make some level of control possible.
If not I think most would enjoy this amp, tones so far have been great 👍👍
It just needs a little push further.
More on delays etc later but yeah it can take drives no problem .

[@qtep6335]

Thanks for creating this video, I love my fender micro but there are very few people pushing the limits of it and posting about it

[@AnthonyBullock1968]

Alec invents the mega mini wireless rig !

[@jwstout007]

Absolutely MAD!!! =)

[@JMal883]

I’ve been using a Lekato Wireless system which keeps cutting out on the FMMP, but no problems with the Katana Go. Have you experienced anything similar with your setup? I thinking I may need to upgrade the wireless aspect.

[@AlecBourneMidiMadScientist]

I'm using my boss WL50 for both the Go and the Fmmp no issues so far. Few guys in the facebook owners clubs with lekato, i would ask there.