Alesis MidiVerb4 Digital Effects Processor

I'm not a guitarist so my opinion of this unit is in stark contrast to the many guitarists who have written in and rubbished this unit. I myself never used this unit on guitar sounds and I don't think that Alesis even designed this to be used in a full blown guitar rack system (my old Quadraverb Plus did much better at processing guitars). I'm a home studio operator and keyboard player and I used this unit mainly for it's reverbs and even for it's leslie speaker effects which I found quite good. It is a quite unit compared to my old Quadraverb Plus but I must say that whilst the reverbs were quite good for a unit of it's price, it did not compare with the great reverbs from my mates Quadraverb 2. My Alesis Wedge reverbs are much better also. I'm not sure if the Wedge algorhythms have been redesigned but they sound better! I generally liked what I could get out of this unit but let me just say that it's not the kind of unit for creating dangerous sounding weird effects, (use an Ensoniq DP, Boss SX700 or Sony HRMP5 for that). It's nice for the safe effects and I liked the delays alot. I must say that I preferred the choruses in my Quadraverb, I did not find the choruses in this unit very satisfying at all to be honest- the same applied for the flangers but they would do if it was my only fx device!!!! The pitch shifing effect was useless (as most are on this kind of unit). I ran this through an fx loop in a Spirit Studio 16/8 mixer. I must say that this unit sounded very different (ie- cleaner) than the Quadraverb Plus so they complimented each other very nicely.

I had problems with the backlight going out and had to get this replaced twice before getting another unit under warranty- this left a little bit of a sour taste in my mouth for Alesis products as the backlight also went in my Quadraverb Plus at around the same time and my S4 Plusses screen also shit itself one day although it 'fixed' itself up and I never had a problem with it afterwards!!!!!!!

I run a midi based home studio doing small time demo work and backing tracks. I've been playing for 20 years and am a private music teacher teaching piano and organ. I traded my unit in when I bought my fantastic Yamaha O3D mixer. If I did get it stolen, I would not have gotten another one and would instead have gotten something like an Ensoniq DP2 (which I'd like to buy one day!). I liked it's ease of use and it's clean sound. It also looked good in the rack. I disliked the fact that it's backlight was unreliable, the rubber (crap!) buttons and I HATE EXTERNAL POWER SUPPLIES!!!!!!!!!! I compared it to the Yamaha REV100 and Zoom 1202 (both it's main competition at the time) but this was a much more flexible unit. I wish it looked, sounded and behaved like a rack of Lexicon, TC and Eventide outboard! (only joking). If the Midiverb was released 12 months earlier, it would have been a big hit but when it came out, there was much competition and I bought it because I got a good price on it at the time. I wouldn't say that this effects unit will go down in history as an all time classic but it got the job done for me. I think it would make a fine live processor (even though I never used it in that way) but I must say that I wouldn't use it as my one and only effects unit.