HXFX with other drive pedals
Hello! I just picked up the HXFX for some fly dates where I don't want to lug my heavy regular pedalboard. I've gone through and designed sounds for each song, but I'm finding the onboard drive models leave a bit to be desired. In general, there is a distinct digital quality to the whole unit, which I can tolerate for modulation and delay and verb, but which really kind of kills the vibe for me with drives (especially light drives). My usual pedalboard uses the Strymon big 3, so I'm no stranger to digital dsp fx, but I've always stuck to analog for drive. Using the HXFX now, I feel sort of vindicated in that habit.
Anyways, ranting over now, I have a couple of questions for anyone more experienced with this box.
1: I'm bringing a few extra pedals, including a tuner. I need an external tuner because I'm using the HXFX's note generator block for some transitions between certain songs. The idea being that I would hit the snapshot with the note generator, it would play some ambient synth pad, and then I'll take a second to tune while that's playing. As it is now, turning on the HXFX's tuner mutes the note generator as well as my guitar's signal. Is there a way to make it so that a preexisting sound (i.e. note generator, loop, tesselator block) will continue to play while the tuner is on? This would save me a little suitcase real estate.
2: As I mentioned, I'm pretty dissatisfied with the drive models, and decided I'd bring my Keeley Tone Workstation as a compact option with 2 (or 3 if you count the compressor) stages of gain that I could use as my main drive. I first just put it in front of the HXFX (i.e. output of tone workstation into input of HXFX) and was getting some strange behavior. First and foremost, no matter how high I turned the level on the tone workstation, the volume out of the hxfx barely changed at all. Normally, if I dime level on that pedal it will be a huge jump in volume. Secondly, there is a strange high pitched squealing that happens if I turn the gain too high on the tone workstation that doesn't happen when I use the pedal alone. Is the HXFX not designed to take other pedals into the front end? It's a little better in the fx loop, but then I have to go through and change all my patches to add an fx loop block. And since I'm just adding the fx loop at the beginning of every signal chain anyways, it feels silly to me that I can't just plug into the front end of the HXFX. Is there a global setting I'm not aware of or something?
Thanks in advance!! Happy playing