Well, finally, my Boss SY-1 pedal arrived today, been waiting on it for months. Short version: worth the wait.
I've played through a lot of synth pedals; the Digitech Bass Synth Wah, Behringer BSY-600, the Bananana Matryoshka, the various EHX pedals including the Mel-9, and over the last few years the technology has kept getting better, especially the recent EHX pedals with excellent tracking, but I think the SY-1 beats them all.
In terms of tracking I've never seen another synth pedal do it as well. Matryoshka is decent and the EHX dash-9 series is good, but the SY-1 seems better. Handles bass pretty much all the way down the E string and evens plays chords well.
The pedal works for both guitar and bass, with a switch on the back to switch between the two modes. It also has volume knobs for both dry and wet. I played bass through it in guitar mode and it still worked just fine. It has a ton of different sounds; 9 categories (lead, pad, organ, etc.) and 11 subtypes for each category, plus two knobs to control parameters for each sound. I spent a few hours just tweaking and playing with it, looking for favorite sounds to come back to later. One category is basically just sound effects of various types.
There is an effects loop with send/return jacks, and an expression pedal jack. I tried it with my general purpose expression pedal but it was weird and hard to control; I think you're supposed to use the recommended Boss pedal. It can also use an external switch pedal.
There are no presets, which I know is a turnoff for some people, and it's not one of the cheapest pedals I've bought, to be honest.
I threw down a quick track here. There is a lot of delay and reverb going on, the repeating figure is on a looper pedal, later in the track some flanger, and the sample and hold effect is from the Matryoshka pedal, but this track has 3 different SY-1 sounds on it and was done in one take just for the hell of it. The thunder-sounding thing in the beginning and end is one of the SY-1's sound effects settings.
