After having a first batch copy of the device at home without a chance to do more than light bedroom noodling (fret hand injury + stitches, drummer playing some travel dates with his other band, Mother's Day), I've finally had a chance to get it out to a long stint of rehearsal with the full band and IEM rig.
Honestly? I was having a small crisis of confidence in the purchase up this point, and I wasn't intending to take the new Anagram board (posted earlier in the thread) but I had stripped down my main board to change out power supplies and a few pedals leaving a roughly 2m diameter explosion of power and patch cables scattered across the floor. I was also waiting for another roll of dual lock to arrive, and Amazon showed up in just about almost but definitely not enough time to rebuild, test, pack up, and get down the road. Anagram board it was then.
I
really liked having the small board in tow tonight. One of the first things I did was find a way to have my guitarist turn on the power at the board when I plugged it in, just so he could see how fast it booted compared to his QC. What can I say? I'm a simple man, and there were an acceptable amount of appreciative nods all around. Crisis lessening.
We got into playing, and it was pretty easy to start building and tweaking the chain as things progressed. Would love to see better visual feedback on the compressors as well as the individual pedals as they're being tweaked, but it was survivable. Honestly... seeing the IO levels on the left and right side of each pedal in the signal chain view would be
amazing, but I digress. Ran into a bug when deleting a pedal that is part of macro in stomp mode, but had figured out a workaround using binding mode to clear things out and wasn't completely derailed.
As for the sound? It got better and better as I was able to dial things in between the room and the IEMs over the course of the session. At some point during the second hour or so I didn't need to mess with things much at all. 1/4" out feeding a SVT + 810 in the room and an XLR with the Leo amp and an Orange 115 + D112 hit the marks quite nicely, and the last hour just settled into playing for the love of it.
I probably could live with the 3 button setup, but I'm really looking forward to MIDI being implemented and getting a few more switches / expression pedals in play. As for the latter, I run 4CM when I can and tying up the return to use an insert cable with the send is a bit of a faff for me. I really do like how easy it is to bind the expression pedal when you are using that socket, so I hope something similar can be worked out over MIDI. Also looking forward to some improvement on the routing UI - it still feels a little constrained.
All in all, I'm back to being quite happy with the Anagram. I don't think it would have been possible to do as much tweaking with the HX Effects as quickly as with the Anagram, and I'm quite familiar with the HXFX. Given this, I'd feel comfortable walking into a room more or less cold and building something useful as I went (and without taking too much time).
I also realized that my relationship and opinions regarding gain / dirts is shifting again, and no amount of my capriciousness has phased the Anagram, yet, so that counts for quite a bit.
