Took delivery of this pedal today, and immediately took it to the rehearsal room to put it through it's paces though my live rig.
Unfortunately one of the lads was giving some lessons in there, so I had to make do with checking it out in my humble home studio.
I was interested in this pedal because I want to have an overdrive or fuzz sound that translates well over largish systems, both when the cab is miked or the DI is taken post FX, without losing low-end. This is obviously very important on bigger PA's if you want to avoid the arse falling out of your sound as soon as you step on your overdrive/fuzz/distortion pedal.
This is a big problem with a lot of pedals, I have found. I also haven't found an overdrive or fuzz I am 100% happy with, and I wanted to be able to achieve my goal while still trying out different pedals.
First impressions of the pedal are great, very solidly built and intuitively labelled. The foot-switch itself feels pretty hard wearing, and the large blue LED is a useful addition for dark stages.
As my main concern was the issue with low-end described above, I decided to record through two chains, keeping everything as similar as possible in the two takes, just removing the X&M from one of them.
This is not a scientific test, and there are possibly more elements to the chain than purists would like. Without access to my live rig, I wanted to replicate it as much as possible using what I had in the house.
Chain 1: Fender USA Precision (flatwounds) > X&M > X&M Hi Out > Fulldrive II Mosfet > X&M Hi In >X&M Mixer > RME Fireface 400 (recording device)>PC
Chain 2: Fender USA Precision (flatwounds) > Fulldrive II Mosfet > RME Fireface 400 (recording device)>PC
In both cases there was some real-time processing via in my DAW, but it was the same for both takes. I was trying to get the flat sound as close as possible to my rig in a room before I started.
The plugin chain for both was:
Waves HUM remover (there was a 50hz hum caused by a shoddy power-supply, the only one I had in the house to power the X&M, I had this problem before with it so I know the X&M is not at fault) > Ampeg SVX Amp Sim (SVT model, flat EQ) > 1176 type compressor (4:1, maybe 3-4dB gain reduction at peaks).
This was a close enough approximation my my live sound to continue so I went with it. I played the opening bars of Zeppelin's 'How Many More Times' as I figured the constant low E would supply a decent amount of low-end for the test. I dialed in an overdriven sound using the crossover knob and attenuating the hi signal coming from the Fulldrive somewhat on the X&M mixer. Apologies if the slightly off timing offends Zep fans :-) , I didn't use a click and was a bit too excited to care about being bang on.
For the second take I just removed the X&M from the chain, left the settings on the Fulldrive the same, and tried to match the level on the Fulldrive by ear using it's volume knob (remember the full drive signal had been attenuated on the X&M in the previous take).
The results were impressive when compared. If you listen on decent headphones or speakers, you can hear the huge difference in low-end in the two takes. This will be even more apparent on large systems which go down VERY low. Now, the two sounds also sound very different... the second sounds more distorted as it is not sitting on a clean low signal, but I figured there was no point in trying to complicate the test further by trying to ease back on the level of overdrive as well as the volume on the 2nd take.
I am delighted with what this box makes possible, and I haven't got into any of the many other practical uses yet. For example, using the X&M without any other pedals, you can set the crossover quite low, turn down high channel, give low channel a bit of a boost, and you have a massive dub bass sound at the switch of a pedal, even if you are playing quite a bright bass with rounds. The crossover frequencies are not labelled on the knob, but in practice this does not matter, as you really need to set it by ear to achieve the required balance between clean low-end and effected hi-end (or whatever else you are doing with the pedal).
Very impressive piece of kit, highly recommended if you are trying to achieve the same as I me. Cannot wait to try it on a big system.
Here are the samples (pedal is engaged after 8bars, 1st is with X&M, 2nd is without):
http://soundcloud.com/gardenparade/bass-x-m/s-tnjzH http://soundcloud.com/gardenparade/bass-no-x-m/s-KpbXX
