The dance of the guitar player (AKA the footswitch dilemma)

The main limit to me in the Mustang I has always been the footswitch.

From the single footswitch i can access to only 3 preset: the green one and the red one. I can select witch one from the 24 saved on the 3 banks. But still i am limited to 2 preset.

Many songs i play need a 3rd tone to make it complete tonewise (and somme other nned only one...).

I've thinked about this problem in a million different ways, this is the last one.

Just imagine the average Joe with an average valve amp and a decent set of somps. No rack, midi or multieffect.

He as 3 channels: one clean, and 2 overdrive, usually a crunch and a lead channel. So 3 basic amp sounds, a clean, an overdrive for the rtythm (maybe less mids here) and a "more overdrive" for the leads (maybe more mids here).

From this basics he add the stomps, say a Tube screamer to doubles the number of channels (giving a bluesy crunch from the clean and overdrive with different characters from the other 2), one or 2 delay and a reverb in the effect loop, something like a chorus where you like better and so on.

But lets get back to campare the 3 channel valve amp with my digital amp.

How many channell will i need?

I have 5 clean preset actually, using 2 different models: a Fender 65 and a Fender 57. And there is a reason for it. Giving that i have 2 preset based on the same with or without corus, i can nail it down to ONLY 4 diffrent BASIC clean tones:

1 - Metal Clean, that is basically a dark but well defined and acustic clean
2 - The piezo, very acustic with a lot of attac
3 - The Deluxe reverb, with gain compression and middish tone
4 - A clean that i call stomper that is shaped for the best tone with pedals like the metal zone

I can, near or less imagine that i could compromise on a "Metal clean" channel and get "The piezo" with a good compression, but there is no way to get The Deluxe Reverb from the same channel with the same EQsettings.

See the problem?

The Dirty tone situation is not that much different. I use the American 90 and the Metal 2K in equal mesure, and i have some patch with the British 80. But all the patches have different EQ.