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Exar Tourbox Thread

Initial quiet thoughts:
Distortion sounds pretty good
Octave downs are clean, track very well
Chorus...haven't played enough yet

The switches are pretty friggin neat. Just a soft tap, none of the conventional clacky obnoxious switches. This pedal was MADE to be played barefoot (or with socks) :P
 
Ok then. I've recorded clips and e-mailed them to Bongomania to use as he pleases. So, here are my thoughts, FWIW.

I like the compact size etc and the switches are very nice indeed. I wasn't crazy about the knobs, the subtle pointer is a little hard to read compared with the more typical white line on a black knob. That's extremely minor.

Soundwise I wasn't very impressed right off but as I dialed and tweaked they grew on me. They're not the warmest sounding pedals but they don't seem to cause any significant tone loss that I could tell.

The Octavium was what had initially attracted me to the tourbox. It's not quite as pleasing to me as the MXR BOD which has a very natural organic sound, IMO, and a really solid response down to a point. The Octavium is more synthy sounding to my ear unless the tone is rolled down and then it's more like the Micro Pog which seems more like straight forward frequency enhancement than a separate tone of it's own. The Octavium didn't consistently track as low for me as the BOD, Micro Pog, or even the BMS but it wasn't too bad. I have a hard time accepting that a pedal doesn't work in my lowest octave so I don't have an octave pedal any more. :crying:
The octave up was cool but octaves up have thus far underwhelmed me. They seem like they do little more than an upper mid boost of sorts. I'm not crazy about the distortion of analog variety or the artificial "weedy" sound of the digital sort. This sounded like a little of both to me.

The Moby Dick was what I was least interested in. I'm not a big chorus fan especially for bass. It didn't seem to loose the bottom, seemed pretty tweakable etc. but it wasn't very warm. My rig isn't what most people would call warm so take this with a grain of salt. I haven't owned a chorus in a long time but I seem to remember the Boss CE-3 (I think) being a bit warmer.

The Distortion was the big surprise for me. I wasn't expecting much, being spoiled by the Blueberry, but I like this pedal. At first it seemed pretty fizzy and cold but with the bass cranked, the treble at 12:00 and the distortion down around 9:00 (or lower) it has a pretty nice warm round tone. The blend knob confused me at first since it doesn't seem to go all the way clean. Somehow this blend sounded better to me than some others I've tried that sounded more layered than blended if that makes sense. I preferred it all the way dirty but it might be a different story in a band mix. I would consider buying this pedal if I were in the market for dirt. I may go back and make some quick A/B clips with the Blueberry for sh@ts and giggles.

The pedals worked very well together. I got a pretty cool synthy sound with octave>distortion>chorus that I enjoyed playing with and both the octave and distortion sounded great in the loop of my Q-tron+.
All in all, decent pedals. Maybe a bit better suited to a warmer rig (I was playing a 55-02 through a PJB Bassbuddy) but not bad at all.
 
I need to amend my review. I figured out the mix knob on the Bass Distortion. It does in fact go all the way clean. I had the bass knob dimed and it was distorting. When I brought it down to 3:00 I was able to get a clean signal. In fooling around with this I discovered that just a little clean boost (especially the somewhat scooped sound of the Exar Bass Distortion) into the Blueberry gives it another dimension.
Anyway, I made some clips A/Bing the Blueberry and the Bass Distortion. Maybe Bongo will host them.
 
Awesome possum! Here are the clips from Swift713, as well as some clips from Eric! mixed in. I apologize if the commingling causes consternation.

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Guys, thank you so much for recording these clips!!!