FINALLY! I got to try one of these today. Here’s my take:
this is a really cool pedal! It does a ridiculous amount of stuff. I had a solid 2.5 hours with it (with 15 minutes on my recently-acquired Future Impact for comparison).
The basic waveforms sound fantastic and fat. Dialling in a bit of the modulation knob, (which introduces a second oscillator with increasing amount of detune) gives a very analogue-sounding gentle phasing, especially on the sawtooth.
I was using a Mexican P with rounds and tracking was great. There were two notes (low F# and F) which caused multiple triggering but that may have been the bass itself.
With the synth voices, the lowpass filters sound gorgeous, especially with resonance. This is the best sounding digital filter I’ve heard. The cutoff goes way low (probably 40Hz or less).
It is very easy to dial in good sounds quickly, and great ones once you’ve got the shift functions down, which doesn’t take too long. (The main thing which tripped me up was the fact that some knobs do completely different things (in shift and normal mode) depending on whether the pedal is in dry (not bypassed), mono, poly or arp mode. I can see how it can easy to quickly lose track of which knobs are set to where. For instance, I was wondering why the dry envelope filtered sound sounded a bit naff. It turns out I’d inadvertently switched compression on which killed all the dynamics. I think this happened because the shift knob on this unit was switching out at the slightest release of pressure (I was operating it one-handed, thumb on button, fingers on dials); I was trying to adjust a different parameter.
The triggered envelope control has some pretty cool possibilities and is capable of a reasonable range of sounds, though it is still frustrating that there isn’t separate control over the attack and decay. Due to the fact there’s no (filter) sustain control, the fast envelopes cut off the sound quite abrubtly at the end. This might also be partly to do with the fact that there’s no separate envelope depth control.
The envelope follower was quite disappointing and didn’t seem to have much of a range. (Perhaps there’s a setting to adjust input gain somewhere but I was only using the quick-start manual as opposed to the full one.) That was a shame as the filter on the dry bass sounded pretty good. Not as fat as my analogue pedals but actually pretty decent. I’m pretty sure the disappointment is due to the lack of envelope sensitivity though as it sounded really rather good when sweeping the filter knob manually.
There’s portamento! This is cool. Sadly the scaling on the knob means there’s much more travel devoted to the longer times than to the shorter (and more useable-to-me) times.
I only played with the arp and poly modes briefly. Arp produced some pretty cool sounds.
Ring mod sounds cool too. I’m not sure if there’s a way to decouple it from the envelope whilst still having the envelope controlling the filter, I’ll have to investigate further.
Pitch shifter sounds cool, though I didn’t play it much.
I put the synth into the highest register for lead sounds and I thought it played much more tightly than the FI. (I’m interested to hear if the new FI update will change that as there is to be a new and improved tracking algorithm.)
I’m partly regretting not having bought this last week when the eBay 15% discount was offered. I didn’t buy it today but I most likely will in future next time a similar discount comes around. Yes, it has its limitations but it the sounds it does make are pretty awesome.
I still hope that the good people at Meris will consider a future firmware update to perhaps add more detailed envelope control and refine the envelope follower. And if somehow more than 16 onboard presets (as opposed to SysEx transfers) were made possible then even better.
The above, it goes without saying (except here I am saying it anyway), is all IMHO etc. I apologise if I’ve made any factual errors as regards spec or functionality - hopefully
@_Angelo_ will correct me. Congratulations on a fantastic product, Angelo and team.
