View attachment 3639710
Came home from my gig to find these pedals waiting for me in a package from Dino The Ampeg Guy (thx Dino)! And it was a very happy surprise after I pulled a header on the sidewalk half an hour before playing and bruised a rib a little. Not hurting bad yet, thx for asking, yet but it's going to give me some pretty good stabs over the next few days. Took me a little while to get these since Yamaha bought Ampeg almost immediately after they came out, and I didn't want to bust stones. I'm an endorser, but I'm a polite endorser. Got about an hour at the house with them, so these are first impressions for sure and I reserve the right to change my mind once I get on the playing field, especially the Opto Comp.
Speaking of which, lest anyone thinks this is going to be a blatant holiday plug (you still have time to order in time
), my pedal universe is bigger than some but I like to keep it relatively small and manageable. That means if a pedal isn't cutting it, out it goes unless it's too cheap to sell or send back. I am very much an Ampeg amplifier nut, but I rule my pedal universe with an iron hand, I slice through the BS with a knife and I do it quickly. Nobody is spared my wrath, not even Ampeg, and you can take that to the bank. What good it will do you at the bank, who knows? But I do my best to be honest. Sometimes I may tart down the home team critiques in a polite manner, but I try to do that for all of them unless they're utter crap. But first impressions are that they're not utter crap, and are actually pretty cool.
I used to use compression but have hated it for over 10 years now, though I've been kinda sorta looking again over the past year. Haven't wanted to spend much on it since it's so not mission critical for me, but despite being super critical of compressors, I'm at least open to the idea again. So we'll start with the Opto Comp. It's very hard for me to tell if I like a compressor without a band context, but I do like what I hear so far. It's a mild-to-wild type pedal, where it goes from lightly clamping down on the outer reaches of your playing to full-on squishy squash. How little it lightly clamps down I'm not sure yet, and I really want to preserve most of my dynamic range, especially when playing lightly, but it does seem to have more dynamic range when you play quietly than some. I think I found a good setting for my tastes with compression at the first marker and release all the way down for quickest release...just enough to hit the outer edges. Seems to work and play well with other pedals, too. Solid comp that's easy to use but seems pretty versatile, adds very little extra noise unless you slam it really hard (a very slight bit of noise is inherent in all compressors I've used, some more than others). Won't know more till I get to use it with music, so that's as much as I can tell you now.
Chorus is another pedal I grew to hate for a long time, but I've somehow developed a taste for it again and actually bought an MXR Bass Chorus Deluxe. Now I own two choruses. The BCD and Liquifier are both up my alley tonally, which is a pretty warm tone and not as hard as something in the Boss realm. No tone knobs on the Liquifier but it's very much in line with my clean tone, a little less bright than I can get with the BCD's treble knob, but good solid low end that doesn't disappear. There are two extremely cool things about it IMHO...first is the blend knob. I'm enjoying being able to tailor how little or little of a wet/dry blend I want a lot. It gives it some extreme versatility, also ranging from mild to wild. The second thing is it goes from mild to wild. Crank those knobs up all the way, including the blend knob which gives you nothing but affected signal, and it gives you a super fast and choppy sound with harmonics flying everywhere, not unlike a ring modulator. Add fuzz for bonus fun. Someone somewhere in some type of music will find that a very useful sound. But it still sounds really good when your chorus usage is more mainstream.
Hope everyone has a joyous Christmahanukakwaanzica season. Mine's off to quite a nice start!!!
