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Exar Tourbox Thread

#202
Wrote up chorus pedal review after a few hours in the studio with it today. Will post soon,...

Initial impressions of all 3 pedals is positive, especially considering the budget price point! I see two favorable reviews emerging & one not-so-favorable. (I'm surprised by the one pedal I don't like initially,... I'll give it more time before I review it though.)
 
#205
Reviews completed with integrated clips and pictures on my website. I managed to spend more time with all of the pedals and get better sounds out of the Bass Distortion.

Anyways,... honest reviews at justinoscarcary.com - Gear Reviews - -EXAR Electronix Bass Pedals

I'll have the tourbox re-packaged and on its' way to the next 'victim' mid-week. Just to be clear, who's next? The order got off (a piece of the address page was torn off deliberately - :confused:). I assume it is TheMutt?
 
#210
Tourbox just arived! I have had a chance to quickly flip through the pedals for a little while through my TC rig, but unfortunately the main bass is out for some much-needed setup and I don't think it will be done before I need to ship these back out. I'll try to get some clips up this weekend if possible, as well as some pics or something. I'll be running these pedals through my tube rig this weekend, and should (hopefully) have everything ready to go by Wednesday next week at latest.

Initial impressions: So far I would say that the Bass Distortion is my favorite of the three pedals. The low EQ has enough boost to really shake the walls if you want it to. I think I need to spend more time with the Moby Dick and the Octavium to really have much to say about either right now.

One thing that I did notice, however, was a small flaw in the design of the battery compartment. I really like the ease of being able to pop a new battery in and out of the pedal as you need to, but unfortunately somewhere along the way to me the battery inside the Moby Dick became loose and would not make a connection until I (carefully!) bent the pins back out again so that the terminals would make contact. It's a really great idea to use inside the pedal, but I think that the pins need to be made out of a thicker piece of metal, be spring loaded, or have a slightly different design to take into account the rough life that most pedal boards have. On the plus side, it is much easier to remove the battery than those annoying snaps that eventually break in half if they are the flimsy plastic ones, or in which the snap piece eventually breaks off and is still stuck on the battery if they are the hard plastic ones.
 
#211
Been a crazy busy week with projects so I didn't get much time in to sit down and do any recording. I also totally forgot to take any pictures. However the tourbox is off and away to Fuzzboxvoodoo.

Here are my thoughts:

Overall, I would agree that these pedals are very well built with some very sturdy enclosures and solid feeling jacks and potentiometers. The switches appear to be a little less durable than the rest of the enclosure, but it wouldn't surprise me much if they were able to hold up to heavy gigging. The battery compartment could use some strengthening, but it is personally a non-issue for me as I always run things off of a power adapter. I am unsure of how well the rubber feet would stand up to being used on the floor without a pedalboard (but my experience with BOSS and DigiTech pedals makes me think they should be fine), but I wonder what would be the best way to mount these pedals to a pedalboard.

Bass Distortion:
By far my favorite of the three. Lots of gain (so much so that I could easily feedback my Jazz Bass), very useful tone controls, and I love that there is a blend built-in (I'm a big fan of blending some clean signal back in). The overall tone of the pedal was surprisingly versatile and I could go from a flat distortion sound to an ear-splitting tinny sound to a wall shaking deep tone with no problems. This pedal also seemed to love simple chords as well as more complex chords (as long as the gain wasn't extremely high). Of the three, this is the one that I would be most likely to purchase.

Moby Dick:
At first I was extremely confused with the name of this chorus. With a regular bass, it was just an extremely thick chorus sound that wouldn't get lost in the mix (if anything, it stands way the heck out). With my Hellcat VI (Bass VI type instrument) through my TC RH450/210 cab (set flat) the results were very different. It seemed that even on the lowest depth setting, the chorus had a very seasick swirl to it that was a bit over the top. It seemed like even at the lowest depth setting, the depth was more like 12:00 on other chorii (choruses?). Increasing the depth only made this more and more pronounced until 12:00 where the swirl started taking over the signal and made it sound like a spaceship. People with a high C 5'er (or Bass VI, other higher register bass, or those who play high up on the neck) may want to take note of this. Through a less hi-fi amp, or on less bright eq settings, the chorus was fine, and the tone and mix controls are a very nice touch. (However, I still like my Analogman better.)

Octavium:
I am not really into octavers anymore as they just don't do anything for me that I find useful for the music I am playing at current. Personally, I found that the +1 octave didn't sound that great through my jazz bass (mind you it's strung up with some slightly dead Chromes and has been modified quite a bit). It did sound a bit better with my Hellcat VI, but the -1/-2 octave tone wasn't quite on the level with an OC-2/OC-3 or an Octron (both of which I like more, personally).
 
#213
I got them today. I gave them a quick go-round and predictably I like the Octavium the best. I chorus is very versatile from super thick and syrupy to barely notable, and the distortion has some things I like about it, but I've never really sought out or cycled through tons of chorus or distortion so I didn't expect to love them. I rigged up the octavium to the slow filter and slow volume delay on my M13 and got a pretty passable BMS impression which was something I was hopeful for. I can't compare the Octavium to an OC2 or a Octron. It tracks better than I remember my BMS tracking, but not as well as my M13 octave. Tone on the octave down is comparable to the M13, but probably a wee bit smoother.

I intend to get clips of some arrangements that aren't on this thread before I send them back to Cyrus but it could take a few days as my life has many things to interrupt the setting up of recording gear.

Til then.
 
#216
As DIO sang, he's "the throw before the toss".


Whatever that means. :p :D


I do intend to start another tour with other pedals, but I haven't decided yet whether to wait until the new lineup comes out. Series 5 includes a better compressor and better footswitches, but it will likely be another 6 months before that line is in production.
 
#217
bongomania said:
As DIO sang, he's "the throw before the toss".


Whatever that means. :p :D


I do intend to start another tour with other pedals, but I haven't decided yet whether to wait until the new lineup comes out. Series 5 includes a better compressor and better footswitches, but it will likely be another 6 months before that line is in production.
Click to expand...

If you do put together another tour box, I recommend including the Multi-WAH. I've been impressed with it on my bass rig and I'll do a review once I play with the various settings a bit more.
 
#220
So here's my impressions after a few days of playing. You'll have to take these with a bit of a grain of salt as I don't have a good gig situation right now to put these into a mix.

Overall: Smaller than I expected. Heavy for its size. Pots have solid feel, but some of them were already scratchy by the time they got to me. Switch didn't bother me since I've always been a tapper and not a stomper. Boss switches usually require me to make a conscious effort to hit them hard enough.


Octavium: I went from really liking this one to not liking it a ton this week. The octave down was smooth, but wasn't really as aggressive as I liked. The longer I played with it the less enamored of it I became. I did like the 2 octave down better for tone, but I could barely get it audible with my setup unless I played WAY up on the neck. Maybe I need to biamp with a sub. The other problem was the tracking. It wasn't bad, but wasn't great either. It seemed to decay glitchy which hasn't happened to me on other octave pedals that I have used (BMS, M13, Multiplexer, HOG) unless it was designed glitchy (Pollyanna), or I was playing really low on the neck.

The octave up wasn't bad either, but I think I would have prefered having the tone option on this one as opposed to both of the octaves down. I would have liked to accentuated the highs of the octave up more than I was able.

The biggest problem with the octavium in my setup is the noise. This one seems to really bring on the noise, much more-so than the other two of the tourbox. I wanted to make clips of it with the slow filter on my M13, but the noise of that combination was unbearable. Originally I thought it was my bass needing a new pot that was causing the problem, but none of my basses could bring the noise down. I need to sort out some noise in my recording setup regardless, but the Octavium took a little noise and made it a lot of noise.

If you want to fill out the sound without drawing a ton of attention to yourself, then I'd recommend this to do it if it wasn't for the noise. For any other more obvious purposes, I'd have to recommend something else. If no one else had noise issues with this, then it is probably my stuff causing it.


Bass Distortion: This one grew on me the more I played with it. I owned a ODB-3 a few years ago, and this sounds a lot like I wanted the ODB to sound while I owned it. Similar break up, without the noise or fear of shooting into feedback at the drop of a hat. It is touch sensitive, but it's not very progressive. It has a low gain breakup that slowly gets a little more aggressive, then all of a sudden goes into full distortion breakup, where it continues to clip more slowly till it's really saturated. I could either really like this or really hate this, depending on what I needed the tones for.

EQ doesn't seem to axe the mids by default, but it can.

It has a mix knob, but I don't feel like it NEEDS it.

If I needed an ODB-3 type tone I would absolutely own this pedal.


Moby Dick: I don't generally care for chorus, but I really like this pedal. It is very versatile. From just on the outer edges of experimentation to a barely audible chorus effect and everything in-between. The effect level control allows for extremely wobbly settings to just barely sit on the top of your tone if you want. It will also allow for the dizzyingly wobbly settings to be prominent if you choose. Depth and Rate controls also allow for a wide variety of sounds without being difficult to dial in. Tone knob... is a tone knob. With my limited experience I would call it somewhere in-between watery and icy, but I feel like a little bit of both is in the pedal. In the past I've preferred chorus pedals that sound to my ear as watery.

If I go back to singles from my M13 and start itching for chorus, I will seriously consider this as well. I have no problem recommending this pedal to someone else.

I have to sort through all of my crappy recordings to make them less crappy before I post them. Hopefully I can edit out enough of the crap to make them good :D.

Hope this is helpful.
 

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