12 gauge flatwounds! Make them stronger than D’Addarios and I would make the change immediately. My Jazzmaster breaks the ball end off of those things like nobody’s business as soon as I start using the tremolo (actually vibrato) bar, which is irritating because it’s like $10+ per pack (close to $12 right now but that’s because prices always spike a bit between New Years and summer, plus the economy situation isn’t helping anything) and the strings SOUND good forever, assuming the colored ball doesn’t break out.

The $5 Slinkys on my Strat will never ever break no matter what but they start sounding super lousy inside of a couple of weeks. Boo Ernie Ball. I may pick up a pack of EHX 10’s and see how they fare this week, actually – it would be a welcome change for my poor, neglected Stratocaster.

The HOG can do this nicely, but it’s pricy and way too feature-filled to be a plausible choice for someone looking solely for a drop-tuning effect. You can either use the root slider or the +5th slider in octave down mode and bend the note to taste with the expression pedal; I used this method to tune down to B for a drone band I’m playing in, but I had to stop because it doesn’t sound quite right with distortion no matter whether the dirt is before or after the HOG. On a clean guitar, it works great and sounds surprisingly natural.

I had limited time with a Polyphase, but here are my thoughts: You can get just about ANY phase sound out of it, plus awesome wah/envelope filter-like tones. However, it lacks that certain ‘something’ that made the Small Stone and Phase 90 classics. That having been said, if I had to choose one phaser to own it would be the Polyphase without a doubt. It can ‘get’ such a vast array of tones that it’s tough to be upset when you don’t ‘nail’ the tone, dig? Plus the expression features AND the square wave function make it the single most versatile and the 2nd most unique phaser out there IMO (second only to the Flanger Hoax). Definitely try before you trade or buy or anything, but I doubt you’ll miss the Small Stone TOO much when you have such a vast array of usable sounds at your feet. (FWIW, the differences are particularly negligible if you run it before distortion.)

My $.02, hope it helps!

My friend plays a Micro Q-Tron with bass, it sounds really good in LP mode although you lose alot of low tone in any of the other modes. I definitely like the Q-Tron better than the Bassballs.

Also, welcome to the forums!

The big boxes have been in production for years, and there’s no shortage of them kicking around ebay and guitar shops – nor will there be for several years. Obviously some people are immediately going to try and drive prices through the roof, but these people are nothing more than opportunists and prices won’t likely raise by much for at LEAST a couple of years.

Here are my thoughts: The harmonies sound a little creepy in the context of my songs, especially when you start gender bending them. The unison mode is rad and the whistle is surprisingly good, and the vocoder is way more fun than it should be. The octaves sounds pretty cool when you get them mixed way in the background, and you can gender bend them for crazy, trippy stuff. The reverb sounds great, absolutely great. The tracking is spot on in all modes, and my only real complaint is that they set up the presets like the Hazarai delay, where each mode gets one preset. I’d have preferred a preset bank that you can scroll through, like the Holiest Grail or the HOG, so that you could have two different vocoder sounds etc… This way is still fine, though.

I essentially bought it for the vocoder, the reverb and the unison and it doesn’t surprise me that the harmonies don’t fit my music, so I’m extremely satisfied. Overall, it gets a big thumbs up AND it has inspired me to write more ‘harmonic’ songs.

I know a man who solders, de-solders and re-solders with nothing more than a magnifying glass, a pair of fine tweezers and a slightly-skinnier-than-average soldering tip. I’m not saying he likes it, I’m just saying it’s not as hard as you might think to mod the XO pedals.

PS I love it, shame I already have a classic Grail. Not that the old one was particularly large, though… Where is the giant benefit in shrinking something that was small already?

Still, Nano enclosures > MXR by a long shot because they have the power jack in a sensible place and because the effect doesn’t bleed through into the bypassed signal (although to be fair MXR has been getting better with their newer effects).

Now all we need is a 6-knob XO Holier Grail, and a HOG-sized “Holy Grail Literally Containing the Blood of Christ” (or something along those lines, and only for completion’s sake. Like a Holiest Grail with Hazarai, there could be detune knobs and a filter with adjustable resonance, attack control etc – picture the HOG but with the ten voice sliders handling Long Spring, Short Spring, Large Hall, Short Hall, Spring Modulation Depth, Spring Modulation Rate, Hall Modulation Depth, Hall Modulation Rate, Spring Detune and Hall Detune. There could be a Dry envelope control and a Reverb envelope control, so that the reverb could slowly fade in and THEN the dry instrument could slowly fade in or vice versa – just imagine, it’s easy if you try). I think after that, there will be a Grail in every shape and size box you guys make, making it a true EHX mega-franchise!