Boss adds two new pedals to the 500 series

[Phil O'Keefe]

Did you folks see this?

 

http://www.harmonycentral.com/news/500-series-expanded-with-reverb-and-modulation---like-a-boss

 

 

 

 

Thoughts?

[dweebking]

competing with strymon is like ford competing with cadilliac ? bread n butter classics are still bread n butter.

kinda wonder if they'd gone the H9/toneport route with dual engines. i'm sure they're hitting the right

features/demographic, but they've got kemper, fractal, & atomic amps on one side, evantide and strymon on another,

line6 and digitech on still another, and a sh!t ton of chinese clones below, and then theres the "custom shop"

innovators creating new classes and combinations of effects that make the classics look like your fathers oldsmobile.

boss raises the bar, by turning a stationwagon into an suv, but i think were not far off from putting the proprietary

hardware behind us with a 'vesa' [mesa] standard for music gear with slot mounted dsps, vsts, and algorithms

 

yeah, i know. you'll have to pry the germanium transistors out of my cold dead fingers, lol

[mikesr1963]

Wow. It's above my price point unfortunately.

[Trick Fall]

Been on a bit of a spree and picked up the RV-500 a couple of weeks ago and so far I'm really impressed. I really love the Hall and Plate verbs and I think the Space Echo emulation is great and I own an original. I'm not going to say it's exactly like it, but much like the original it does a great job of blending with and enhancing your regular guitar sound in a way that digital delays don't. I love that all of the reverbs also have a basic delay that can be set to toggle on and off with the "C" foot switch. This allowed me to replace both my reverb pedal (TC Hall of Fame) and delay (TC Nova). Now, I'm not a power delay user and I can see why others would need a separate delay pedal, but the delay on the RV-500 covers my needs.

 

I also was impressed with the editing software. It really makes ordering and naming presets a breeze and for the most part is pretty simple to use. The only thing I've had some trouble with is consitently assigning the function of the "C" foot switch. Speaking of the foot switches you can assign different functionalities to the foot switches based on the way you want to use the pedal. I like the default setup where the "A" and "B" switches switch between two presets. In other words when you press on A that preset comes on and if you press it again you are in bypass, but if press B the preset immediately changes to B. You can also set it up so that both presets are on at the same time and can be assigned to either the left, or right output. I can definitely see having some fun doing this and going out to two amps.

 

I will say, I've never used any of the Strymon reverb pedals and I imagine they probably have some sounds that are better than the Boss, but I also think the Boss probably does some sounds better than the Strymons. I've also used and own an Eventide H3000 and have experience with some of the high end Lexicon units and honestly this thing is not worlds apart from those types of units. I also ran some synths through it and had no problems with the levels and thought it worked great in this application.

 

The only negatives I can think of with this pedal are the spring setting which just didn't sound good to me and that it doesn't come with a power supply which is almost a necessity with a pedal like this. I also am slightly leery of the build quality as it does feel solid, but one of the knobs popped off pretty easily when I was mounting it on my board. I was easily able to put it back on and Boss pedals are known for durability, but the pot shafts did seem to be a weak point.

[WRGKMC]

I don't know. Who really needs 28 different reverbs playing live. I can easily guess 27 of those reverbs wont be used once a person figures out which one they like best.

 

I can see it being used for recording where variety might be needed, but my experience playing live tells me for live it's simply overkill. Most rooms and halls you play in have a natural reverb. By the time the sound gets to most peoples ears they wont be able to tell one reverb type from another.

 

 

The modulation/chorus might be more useful but again, I've rarely used more then one chorus playing live. Sometimes I may stack a rotary with a chorus but I cant see needing 28 different modulations in a show.

 

Both look to be fairly large pedals requiring allot of real estate. If they were multi effect pedals I'd say its about time Boss downsized their units from being nearly as big as a Fender electric guitar case but these are single effect units which are still huge for what they do.

[Trick Fall]

I don't know. Who really needs 28 different reverbs playing live. I can easily guess 27 of those reverbs wont be used once a person figures out which one they like best.

 

 

I know what you're saying, but having different presets is really helpful for me. I will probably wind up using four banks with two presets each for my live set. Some of these will be fairly simple variations, but it's nice to be able to set things up so that you can have a preset that's just reverb, but also be able to have the same preset with delay as well as the reverb. There's definitely modes I'll probably never use, but for me even just being able to have presets of the same mode with different settings is awesome. Also I was afraid the pedal would be huge, but it's quite reasonably sized. It's just big enough to be practical with three foot switches, but it's small enough to not take up half my board.

 

[WRGKMC]

^^^ Are you going to be using the midi function to link them? Seems like these pedals might be targeted to work with Boss's new MS3 pedal which loops pedals and also connects via midi. One of the other Forum members seibertdr had a post about that pedal. Might be something that would be ideally suited for you here.