Tutorial: Put Your Presets on the Pedal

Goal: your three or four gig sounds stored in the pedal itself, recallable from its footswitches with the laptop left at home.

You’ll need: a pedal with MIDI-writable preset slots (most Chase Bliss, Strymon, Meris, and many others — the Write to pedal button in the header tells you), and saved presets to write.

1. Build your shortlist

   Save the presets you actually use — yours, AI-generated, or copies from the community. See Save and Share Your First Preset if you haven’t yet.

2. Load the first preset

   Open the Presets dropdown in the pedal header and load the preset you want on the pedal. (Write to pedal stays disabled until a preset is loaded — Nitelite tracks slots by preset so it can tell you later what’s where.)

   

3. Write it to a slot

   Click Write to pedal and pick a slot. Nitelite suggests the first empty one. The write mechanism varies by pedal — fully automatic on some (Chase Bliss), a short confirm-on-hardware dance on others; the modal shows the exact steps for your model.

4. Repeat for the rest

   Load the next preset, write it to the next slot. A tip from the trenches: put your presets in set order — slot 1 for the opener, slot 2 for the next tune.

5. Check the map

   The Hardware panel shows every slot assignment across your collection — your answer to “what’s in slot 3 again?” months from now:

   

6. Test without the computer

   Recall the presets from the pedal’s own footswitches/interface (see your pedal’s manual for how it steps through slots). This is the whole point — do a dry run before the gig.

Good to Know

• Slot counts vary wildly: 122 on most Chase Bliss, 300 on a BigSky, 30 on the CXM 1978, fewer elsewhere. The Presets dropdown shows HW SLOTS · used/total.
• Slot recalls and cloud presets stay in sync: recalling a slot from Nitelite also loads the matching preset on screen.
• Updating a sound? Edit the preset, then write it to the same slot — Nitelite defaults to the preset’s existing slot on rewrite.