I just got mine a few days ago, didn't have time to play with it properly until this evening. I bought it from Proaudioland on ebay- I made them an offer and got a tenner off the already decent price. They shipped same day, great service and cheap shipping USPS.
Before I give a mini-review, a few caveats:
- this is my first experience with a pedal of any kind
-I have only played it at home through my Eden WT-550 with one of my bag End S15D cabs, though at decent levels, and the room is a big wooden one with a high ceiling that sucks bass from any rig and emphasizes mids and highs.
Now to the nitty gritty:
This thing is awesome.
Five minutes of 'what the heck?' as I used the recommended settings as a base. So I tossed the pamphlet back in the tin and used my ears only and within 15 minutes I found the two sounds I wanted most from it through my Eden: a big fat but clear reggae tone with my Jazz with flats, with just enough breakup to be audible at the leading edge of every note when I dig in a bit, and a great driven slightly compressed SVT tone with a bit of pushed mids with my Tokai Hard Puncher with Roto rounds.
I can't believe how natural and responsive this pedal is. The reggae tone I'm getting is very close to a B-15 with the bass boosted a lot and the treble rolled off a bit, but at SPLs I could never get from a B-15. I can't imagine how good this will sound with my two Bergie NV cabs, but I'll find out tomorrow at our rehearsal space.
The second is pure SVT OD, but at SPLs that will not cause deafness and birds falling from trees.
As said before, tiny knob adjustments make huge tonal differences, but they are very intuitive to me and though interactive are easy to recreate and even easier to find new useful and musical sounds with. Most importantly I can set it so I can recreate the feel and dynamics of using my SVT in its sweet spot, i.e. on the edge of breakup.
What I love also is being able to add real warmth and bottom without sacrificing clarity or definition, something I haven't really been able to do with my Eden before. The mids are voiced just right for smoothing out or hardening and growling up the sound, just like on my SVT.
Going easy on the drive and highs are the biggest differences from the recommended ones for my tone, and adding in way more mids than recommended gives me a truer and more useful SVT tone. Everything from 9:00 to just after noon on the Character knob gives pure tonally blissful options of various flavours.
Another gorgeous tone I got was pure Jamerson from on my P with Jamerson flats; without the breakup it was always lacking in that extra sweetness and roundness that I was looking for; now I'm channeling the man himself, though at a fraction of his skill level. I was never able to get this tone from either channel of my SVT, being too diffuse and lacking punch with the mids rolled off and too aggressive with them added in.
I will post again after getting some band time with it, but for now I'm just happy to have this thing in my signal chain. The SVT isn't going anywhere, but now I can get my tones wherever and whenever I want, especially through a PA.
In hindsight I wish I had ordered 100 of these last January at NAMM when they were introduced!! I could have easily sold them all.
