Re: ISP Decimator!
+1. I bought a Decimator pedal last year to try out. I couldn't turn the knob past 9:30. It does what it's supposed to do, but I can't stand noise gates. They really mess with all my dynamics. All sustaining notes cut off when the volume gets low enough. Roll down your volume knob, pick softly, and it messes with your notes. I have 5 pedals on my board, and have no need for a gate. I've learned to lower the gain a bit, mute well with both hands, and turn the volume down, in between songs, and areas where I'm not playing.
And this is exactly why I purchased, and sold, the ISP Decimator twice. I had it in my head it was the "best" due to its feedback and after giving it a chance twice, I found it just didn't work at all for my setup. I believe my settings weren't far off from yours disturb. At around the 10 o'clock setting, you can't even hear it cutting off any noise and if you turn it up to cut out that excess noise, your sustain turns to crap as the gate kicks in and "naturally" cuts it off. By naturally, I mean it's like a kid going wild with a volume pedal trying to learn where the sweep is. I think with the noise I had in my setup at one point, I could only just about really hear it cut noise by noon on the dial and at that setting the pedal was completely unusable in my opinion - and a reason why I feel the pedal is a poor design.
The NS-2 colors your base tone really noticeably. For some folks, it's done it in a positive manner (it all depends how your rig is - what kind of capacitance you've built up to that point). For me, it changed the dynamics for the worse. It has been bought and sold twice.
At one time, I had even owned a piece of rack gear called the HUSH Super C. That was a pretty decent noise gate that had a lot more parameters you could tweak to get the gate to sound relatively natural. Alas, I didn't need rack gear (I never had a rack setup to begin with), so I didn't purchase another one when it crapped out. I had owned it a long, long time ago before any of the other noise gate/suppressors so unfortunately I didn't have the opportunity to A/B it with anything else.
The EH Hum Debugger was a nightmare. I was one of the first to purchase the pedal. It was released without proper testing and there was all sorts of weird oscillation and octave type of side effects that makes your tone sound much worse than what it originally was. It's a shame because it sounded like such a good idea at the time and the pre-release video must have been recorded at a really low volume so you couldn't hear the artifacts it was introducing. It was a cool idea, but to say it was a flop would be an understatement; thankfully, the store I purchased it from fully refunded my money after it was released that the pedal was defective from the get-go.
I finally said "falk it"! I sold my amps that made too much noise to begin with, minimized my pedalboard setup and try not to rely on single coils too much. I don't mind a little bit of noise, so my '62 AVRI Strat does get used, but if I was gigging often I'd probably replace the singles with some noiseless variety.
So, whether you like this or not, no matter what people tell you - I've tried several things on the market and I'll tell you this - the NS-2 is about as good as you're going to get currently. If it doesn't work for your setup, you're screwed because I've tried all the other ones that were considered better than the rest and they've all had their own set of issues.
At this point, I'm expecting someone to say I'm an idiot and that their ISP is amazing and blah, blah, blah and all I can say is - spend the money, try it for yourself and then tell me what your results are
