XP-400

way too noisy, even with the built in noise gate. the noise gate itself is kind of shitty...it seems like there's no happy medium between total silence and absolute hiss and clipping distortion that sounds really crappy. i use this with a gibson SG and a jcm 800. soon i'll be using it with an ampeg v4. the jcm 800 is very quiet by itself, although there's quite a bit of noise coming from a boss tu-2 tuner that i have in my signal chain. necessary evil, i suppose. there are some settings that are supposed to be noisy (like patch 28, which is totally killer for a wash of white noise), and of course, the natural decay of most of the reverb patches provides all the GOOD noise that i actually want. the effects themselves are pretty stellar considering that we're talking about digital reverb. i prefer this to the electro harmonix holy grail and the digitech x-series reverb only because it comes with an expression pedal that i can use to fade in and fade out reverb. i only really use two patches (22, plate reverb, and 28, which is just a wash of white noise) so i can't comment on the rest of them, really. the spring wasn't totally realistic but it sounded good.

i've been renting this rather than buying it outright, just to see if i wanted it or not. so far it hasn't let me down but it does seem like it's a little sketchtastic in terms of reliability. there are some loose parts rattling on the inside and the expression pedal doesn't seem like it's built to last. i would love to have a backup, but seeing as i'm renting i could probably just afford to buy something more reliable in the future if i choose to.

it's fairly easy to find a good sound in this thing. it's kind of annoying to have to hold the button down to bank down, but i guess that's why they have six user presets. you can't edit the patches, which is kind of lame, but that's just the way this series was made. there's a list of patches on the back, which is helpful. i only really bought it for a simple hall/plate reverb, but it's also got some gated and reverse stuff that might be cool if you're into that sort of thing. i would really like to be able to tweak the reverb settings myself to make something new.

i've been playing about seven years and i love time based effects and reverb. they've always played an integral part in the making of my sounds and if i had to choose something other than the obvious that i couldn't live without, i would definitely choose reverb and delay. if this pedal was built a bit better and didn't have such a huge issue with noise, i would love to keep it. i don't really need all the bells and whistles, but it's nice to know that they're there. i hated the pop that the eh-grail had (even though it was true bypass) and i also had one fry on me. the same goes for the two digitech x-series reverb pedals that i've gone through. there might have been some adapter mismatches, but i'm not sure exactly what happened. either way, the digitechs have won out in both scenarios and i HATE the way the boss reverbs sound. i'd like to replace this with a fender spring reverb tank at some point, but those don't have stereo outs.

I'm putting this thing through a Mesa/Boogie road king and a roland ready strat. I was looking for two things: a reverse reverb like My Bloody Valentine used in To Here Knows When, and I wanted to be able to control a huge ultra-wet slowdive-y reverb so i could go in and out of it in the chorus of a song. The reverse reverb was great, but none of the factory presets are even close to wet enough for Slowdive. I would've really liked some more versatility. I suppose that the reverbs would be fine for just about every other genre though.

The first one I got had a broken input knob and just made some Satanic noises. I sent it back and the new one the sent me cuts out sometimes, but appears to be usable.

There are no editing options, so all you can do really is scroll up and down and use the factory presets. The manual explained just about everything.

I love experimental and shoegaze, and it works great for the louder stuff, but for the Slowdive type stuff I'll probably have to get a Quadraverb.