What this workflow decides
Every rig CrossWire’s Randomizer publishes follows one canonical order: INPUT > GATE > TIGHT > COMP > drive (OVERDRIVE or DIST) > AMP > CAB > EQ > time effects (DELAY, REVERB) > OUTPUT. The logic is causal, not traditional: dynamics and filters shape what the drive receives, the drive shapes what the amp receives, and time effects hear the finished tone so their tails don’t get re-distorted.
The reason to learn it on a graph instead of a pedalboard is that re-ordering is a thirty-second experiment: click a wire (it turns green), press Delete, drag a new connection from port to port. Two rules the engine enforces for you: a wire dropped on an input that is already fed auto-inserts a MIX node (that is how parallel lanes are born), and connections that would form a loop are rejected.
Where it sits in the graph
Serial order is only half the vocabulary. The published rigs use parallel lanes constantly — country-blues runs TREM beside REVERB, rock runs DELAY beside REVERB, indie runs three ambience lanes at once — because parallel effects hear the dry core, never each other. When a graph grows messy, View → Auto-Layout (Tidy) restacks it, and Options → Align Lanes keeps parallel branches time-aligned.
Worked examples
Three published re-orderings worth recalling and studying (seed · what breaks the rule · why it works).
| Voicing | Values | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Rig Seed 19808 | TREM and REVERB in parallel, not series | The pulse and the room never modulate each other; two MIX nodes rejoin the lanes. |
| Rig Seed 5123 (variation) | REVERB moved before the AMP | The surf tutorial’s spring-into-amp experiment: the amp reacts to the splash. Deliberate, reversible, documented. |
| Rig Seed f1581 | SPLIT crossovers instead of one chain | Free-form order: each frequency band gets its own effects. Recall it with “Free-form graphs” ticked. |
Three practical moves
- Move one node, level-match, decide. Re-wire a single stage, then A/B with the global bypass button while watching the OUT meter. Order changes masquerade as loudness changes; matched level is the only honest comparison.
- Build a parallel lane on purpose. Wire one source into two effects, then drop both onto the next stage’s input — the auto-inserted MIX node’s LEVEL knob becomes your lane fader. This is the single most useful non-pedalboard trick the graph offers.
- Steal structure from the Randomizer. Set the Randomizer to “Pin Selected”, select your AMP and CAB, and roll: CrossWire proposes orderings around your core. Every roll prints a seed, so anything good is recallable and shareable.
Hear it in a real rig
- Country-blues tutorial — read a parallel fork wire by wire
- Surf tutorial — the pre-amp reverb experiment, step by step
- Ambient tutorial — free-form crossover routing (Rig Seed f1581)
Download the standalone app or load the CLAP plugin, recall any Rig Seed named above, and every setting in this guide appears on your own canvas.
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