Pedal Review - July '07 Guitar Player

[duhvoodooman***]

There's a pretty cool feature article in the July '07 issue of GP that looks at 26 different effects pedals. It's not too useful if you're looking to decide between several possibilities for a single effect, because the almost every type of pedal you can think of is included, but generally only one or maybe two of each type. The one exception is overdrive/distortion pedals--there are a dozen of them included, ranging from blues-style overdrive to crushing metal uber-distortion. Still, it makes for a pretty interesting read, if you're a pedal freak!

Some of the names are very familiar (Boss, Digitech, BBE, MXR, Electro-Harmonix), while others are relatively little known boutique pedals. "Street" prices range from the $66 EH Little Big Muff to over $400+ for some of the boutique stuff. Of the 26 pedals reviewed, Editor's Pick status is conferred on four: the DigiTech EX-7 Expression Factory (multi-effects pedal, $200), the Option 5 Destination Rotation Single (rotary speaker emulation, $229), the Seymour Duncan Lava Box (distortion, $99), and the Toadworks Phantasm Dynamic Phaser (well, phaser obviously, $375). Of those, I find the Duncan pedal attractive for it's down-to-earth price, and the DigiTech EX-7--which ain't cheap but delivers seven different pedal-controlled effects and seven different distortion models that can be combined with them--offers an amazing bang for the buck. The EX-7 also has several different signal routing options, adding even more flexibility to its impressive array of capabilities.

So check out the July GP if you want a good read about a diverse group of effects. It's the one with John Petrucci on the cover....

[tot_Ou_tard]

I've been interested in the Lava Box since it was first announced (& long before it was released).

I thought it might be a half price version of the the Blackstone Appliances Mosfet drive which gets some pretty outstanding reviews.

But what do I know, I'm just going by the use of mosfets and lots of OD use mosfets (Fulltone II is another, it has good reviews.)

[Tone2TheBone]

The $66 EH LBM is my next target of opportunity. Thanks for the heads up Voo.

[marnold***]

The DigiTech EX-7--which ain't cheap but delivers seven different pedal-controlled effects and seven different distortion models that can be combined with them--offers an amazing bang for the buck. The EX-7 also has several different signal routing options, adding even more flexibility to its impressive array of capabilities.

So check out the July GP if you want a good read about a diverse group of effects. It's the one with John Petrucci on the cover....

I may have to check that one out. As you know, I've got an EX-7. You may also remember that I was looking at selling it and replacing it with one of the RP modelers. I'm glad I didn't. Now that I've played with it more I'm really getting to enjoy it. The fact that I got it new on eBay for $149 is even better

Some of the FX play better with my AD30VT than others. In general it sounds better to use the EX's distortion models or my OD pedal rather than having the AD30VT distort an already effect-ed signal.

My favorite parts of it are: the Big Muff model, the Boss Metal Zone model, the wahs, and the Whammy's harmonization.

My least favorite parts are: the inability to save any presets, the Whammy tracking on some low notes (although the tracking isn't anywhere near as bad as the Octave pedal demo), and the fact that the Whammy has no "dive bomb" even though the instructions reference it. You can fake it if you play your riffs and octave down and use the "1 octave up->1 octave down" setting.

Once I get my act together (ha!) I'm going to mess with the mixer-out to do some recording.

[abraxas]

I've been interested in the Lava Box since it was first announced (& long before it was released).

I thought it might be a half price version of the the Blackstone Appliances Mosfet drive which gets some pretty outstanding reviews.

But what do I know, I'm just going by the use of mosfets and lots of OD use mosfets (Fulltone II is another, it has good reviews.)

I have the Lava Box for more than 2 months now.

It certainly deserves the praise, esp. for such an inexpensive pedal. It has it's own character and doesn't resemble anything else I've tried. One major "problem " is that it is very difficult to set an appropriate "master volume" setting for clean (bypass)/distorted sound.

[Tone2TheBone]

They feature almost all the pedals in that GP pedal roundup on the guitarplayertv.com site in video demo form. They didn't have the EH Little Big Muff though.... Iago can you state again here the difference in sound from the original Big Muff Pi?