krankguitarist
Krankitupologist
Got a particulary beat-up looking box from fedex today, luckly the guys at sweetwater had done a good job packing my new FX unit.
Very slick-looking unit. I plugged her in, and all the lights came to life, and dayumn. I'm naturally fascinated by anything that blinks/flashes/lights up, so this thing almost sent me into epileptic fits. Pretty, pretty, pretty.
Started playing with the effects, and the first thing that struck me is how intuitive the controls are. You press down on the "Model Select" knob to choose between Delay (green), Modulation (blue), Filter (purple), Reverb (orange), and Drive (yellow) FX, and the screen changes colors accordingly. After you've picked your category, you twist the "Model Select" knob till the specific model you want comes on screen.
After that, you dial in the effect as you would on a stompbox with the 5 other knobs, the functions of which are displayed on the screen. One of the things I hated about the MM4 I had a few years ago was the ambiguously named "tweak" and "tweeze" knobs. I could never quite figure out what I was doing with those, and found it more than a little annoying that I had to keep on looking up their functions for each model.
There's too many FX to do a one-by--one review for them all, but I'm very impressed by many of the models on here, especially in the delay, reverb, and modulation categories. I didn't spend too much time dialing in the drive FX, but my first impressions of them were pretty "meh". I didn't get this unit for drive though, I got it for everything else.
The filters offer some pretty cool sounds as well. I can see myself making use of a few of these as time goes by. A lot of it is "novelty" though.
Onto the looper. Now, I've never used a looper before, but holy hell I love this thing. Once again, its very intuitive, no manual-diving. I was getting crazy reverse-looped sounds within five minutes. It'll be great in a band setting as well...not only for making crazy atmospheric loops, but for teaching the other guitarist riffs.
The cons so far are relatively small, though. I do wish that there was one more FX engine available, but all in all it's not that big of a deal. I also wish that it had an expression pedal built-in, and that's the slightly more irritating omission. The other thing is when I was playing around with the "reverse" delay setting, I was having a little difficulty getting the delay time parameter to change...it was stuck at 2000ms, and moving the knob only changed it about 1ms. I messed around with hitting the tap tempo switch a few times, and turning the knob furiously, and it suddenly started working. So who knows what that's all about, hopefully that won't show up again.
All in all, I'm glad that I picked this thing up. Next thing is I'm gonna need to get an expression pedal for it. If I like the wah enough on it, I might even pass on bringing my fulltone wah to gigs. I'm all about simple equipment: simple setup, simple tear-down, simple to use, simple to understand, etc, etc. This thing delivers.
Jesus I'm glad I don't use a G-force anymore.
Very slick-looking unit. I plugged her in, and all the lights came to life, and dayumn. I'm naturally fascinated by anything that blinks/flashes/lights up, so this thing almost sent me into epileptic fits. Pretty, pretty, pretty.
Started playing with the effects, and the first thing that struck me is how intuitive the controls are. You press down on the "Model Select" knob to choose between Delay (green), Modulation (blue), Filter (purple), Reverb (orange), and Drive (yellow) FX, and the screen changes colors accordingly. After you've picked your category, you twist the "Model Select" knob till the specific model you want comes on screen.
After that, you dial in the effect as you would on a stompbox with the 5 other knobs, the functions of which are displayed on the screen. One of the things I hated about the MM4 I had a few years ago was the ambiguously named "tweak" and "tweeze" knobs. I could never quite figure out what I was doing with those, and found it more than a little annoying that I had to keep on looking up their functions for each model.
There's too many FX to do a one-by--one review for them all, but I'm very impressed by many of the models on here, especially in the delay, reverb, and modulation categories. I didn't spend too much time dialing in the drive FX, but my first impressions of them were pretty "meh". I didn't get this unit for drive though, I got it for everything else.
The filters offer some pretty cool sounds as well. I can see myself making use of a few of these as time goes by. A lot of it is "novelty" though.
Onto the looper. Now, I've never used a looper before, but holy hell I love this thing. Once again, its very intuitive, no manual-diving. I was getting crazy reverse-looped sounds within five minutes. It'll be great in a band setting as well...not only for making crazy atmospheric loops, but for teaching the other guitarist riffs.
The cons so far are relatively small, though. I do wish that there was one more FX engine available, but all in all it's not that big of a deal. I also wish that it had an expression pedal built-in, and that's the slightly more irritating omission. The other thing is when I was playing around with the "reverse" delay setting, I was having a little difficulty getting the delay time parameter to change...it was stuck at 2000ms, and moving the knob only changed it about 1ms. I messed around with hitting the tap tempo switch a few times, and turning the knob furiously, and it suddenly started working. So who knows what that's all about, hopefully that won't show up again.
All in all, I'm glad that I picked this thing up. Next thing is I'm gonna need to get an expression pedal for it. If I like the wah enough on it, I might even pass on bringing my fulltone wah to gigs. I'm all about simple equipment: simple setup, simple tear-down, simple to use, simple to understand, etc, etc. This thing delivers.
Jesus I'm glad I don't use a G-force anymore.
. I end up hitting the wrong switch on my mark IV's footswitch a whole lot more. 
