stomp boxes all the way!!!

if you think about it, you can fit more quality into something small than several into a big one.

Yeah, I’m firmly in the stomp-box camp. Companies like Line 6 and Vox are doing great things, but I still feel removed from the sound when I play digital effects. Maybe it’s all psychological, but it feels like I’m “triggering” something instead of “playing” something, ya know?

The worst for me is, I bought a little Vox DA5 with a bunch of effects, and it just made me go out and buy more stomp-boxes, since I wanted to try the “real” version.

I think both have their uses. I love using different dirt pedals and I much prefer single pedals for this, but honestly I wouldn’t mind having all my modulations and delay in a single unit because I don’t really use them that much… at home I usually use an old Zoom rack multi fx for modulation and delay and it does the job fine and sounds really good, it was also really cheap which gives me more money to spend on cool distortion pedals!!

I don’t really buy into the whole single FX ‘always sound better’ theory either, There are lots of single pedals around that sound very poor. I think the real advantage is the ‘mix and match’ nature of single units, you can’t, for example, take the overdrives off one multi, add the chorus off another multi and the delays from another, that could make choosing one difficult. With single effects you have the chance to choose exactly what you want from each effect.

If you read enough threads/topics about guitar pedals, you’ll noticed that people spend a huge amount of time with any given stompbox, seeing how it fits into their signal chain, and finding the perfect setting for what they’re looking for.

When you read enough threads/topics about modelers and multi-effects units, you’ll notice that people spend a lot of time at the macro level of the patches, but not a lot at every single effect which makes up part of any particular patch.

If people spent the same amount of time on the individual parts of multi-effects units as they did on individual stompboxes, they’d get better results.

There are other issues as well. A lot of people don’t understand that one shouldn’t use the ambient settings, which add the space and air of an amp and its interaction with the environment, when then running such effects through an amp. Doing so just makes things sound noisy, because running that ambient processing through the system again just duplicates any noise problems which are inherent in live sound reproduction/reinforcement. That’s why you hear so many complaints about “fizz”; it’s ignorance on the part of those who never learned what their multi is doing.

Given that some multifx boxes contain the same basic sounds as stompboxes, it’s hard to argue that something like the Line 6 M13 and M9 don’t have many of the same patches as the stompboxes they’re modelling. The Boss GT and ME units sound great, and are capable of amazing things.

I do own stompboxes, as there are some things which aren’t available in a multifx unit. My HOG and POG2 are pretty unique. My TC Nova Modulator manages to replicate all the Electric Mistress stuff (including, surprisingly, the Filter Matrix settings), so it stays on the board. (My Yamaha UD-Stomp does as well, but I don’t want to take that out gigging, given its rarity.)

Ideally, I’d be able to spend a huge amount of time with a Line 6 X3 and an M13, and see how close I could get to everything else. It can be really great to just carry an ME-70 into a place and run that, instead of having to carry in huge pedalboards. If it does what you need on a gig, and sounds good, that’s all you need.

There’s quite a difference between experimenting endlessly at practice space or bedroom volume levels, and actually playing a gig and fitting into a band. Stevie Ray Vaughan had less than 6 pedals on his board, including his Tube Screamer, and it was less than boutique. If he could make do with less, and still get across what he wanted, I have to realize that technique counts more towards having a sound that communicates than having a bunch a pedals I can endlessly tweak….