New Pedal Day

[WRGKMC]

Waiting on a Delta Lab pedal to arrive in a few days. This one had pretty good specs plus its got a built in drum machine. Delta Lab was big in the 80's and competed with Eventide, Lexicon and Alesis as PA Rack Effects units. I hadn't seen them make any guitar pedals before.

 

I checked the specs and though the effects are digital the sample rates are exceptionally high for a pedal that is like 15 years old or so.

 

AD converters: 32-bit 64x oversampling

DA converters: 32-bit 128x oversampling

Sampling Rate: 48kHz

 

Its got 54 different effects and dual function expression pedal.

Its a small unit with only 48 preset and 48 memory but I only use these multi effects units for direct recording.

Playing live I use regular guitar pedals but these multi effect units can be allot of fun recording because you have the time to tweak in the sounds you want.

The drum beats are handy for music writing too.

 

It has practically no wear so I believe the owner when he says he used it a few times and stuck it back in the box.

I suppose I should start to get rid of some of the excess pedals I have. I'm running out of shelf and closet space to store these things.

I guess with each new buy you think you'll come across something that inspires you to play things you haven't before so you keep trying out different ones.

 

Maybe its just because you have tons of low cost pedals now and its safer and easier to try out different types until you find the ones that suit your style best.

I've got some excellent clones of high end pedals which were very inexpensive and I'm glad I did buy the clone over the real thing because they didn't suit my needs and an original would have been a waste of money. Then you have others which do sound good enough to use as is or good enough to know an upgrade would be even better.

 

If I were still recording a couple days a week I could see keeping extras for the guest guitarists rig but I'm not even using my own pedals much so Maybe it is time to cash them in and use that money for something else. In the meantime I been using these multi effects for purely convenience purposes. Hopefully this one will do a decent job recording too.

This one does have the expression pedal and since it can be assigned to different parameters you can do some neat things with them.

 

The guy in this video seems to just be scrolling through the stock settings which are typically over the top and designed to showcase what the pedal can do. What I typically do is scroll through them with a pad of paper in hand and make notes about the presets I like and don't like and what each preset has too much or too little of. Often times they are in random order too so I'll come up with a list of presets I can build from and modify my own settings in some kind of order that I can use. If its for live I may have like 3 of the same plugins, one cleaner for rhythm, then one slightly driven and one set for leads. Kind of like having 3 drive pedals set at different gain levels. You want to avoid having to scroll from one end to the other switching from rhythm to lead because it obviously takes time and you want those presets right next to each other.

 

For recording I can simply make up 1~20 Rhythm presets and 21~40 lead. I'm not worried about switching when recording. Anyway if you can suffer through this players poor application you can hear that the pedal has some decent sounding effects even though they are in dire need of tweaking. I may be able to squeak some sounds out of this one I cant get with my other pedals. Variety is the key when it comes to recording otherwise every song begins to sound the same. Its ok if you have a CD's worth of songs using the same gear but like most studio albums you hear, bands evolve over time and adopt new gear and different tones. Got to try out new stuff to keep that edge happening, even if its older gear you simply haven't tried before.

 

[video=youtube_share;wU7jfATffLk]

[WRGKMC]

Did some recordings with this over the weekend and wound up being very pleased with the sounds I was able to get.

I only had a half dozen presets built but they were fine for trying things out. Running it in stereo sounded quite excellent.

There were a few things that could have been better. It has two choruses which I wasn't exactly thrilled by. The echo and verbs made up for it.

I have several of these types of multieffect units for recording and though this one has fewer amp/cab combinations when combined with the EQ they have allot of versatility. The Fender amp tones were excellent as were the high gain amps. Compression was very mild sounding. Hard to recognize it was even working. Pitch bender worked very well. The built in drums were not very good but sufficient for music writing purposes.

 

Over all I got an excellent deal on this for $30. Mint condition too. Its hard enough to find single pedals that work well and I got the whole pedal arsenal in one unit.