sindre's Metal Pedalboard

Great sound, noisefree, highly customisable using Toneprint. Not all presets are useful, the loop function is pretty basic, and more than one Toneprint preset would have been great. Still, the best there is for this kind of money.

I use one of these with its bigger brother for rhythmic delays. Sounds great, cost little, and Toneprint makes it sound however you want.

This is in fact a sophisticated pitch shifter/octave pedal. Tracking is actually very good, and the pedal works well with simpler chords. Latency is noticeable, but not problematic. The problem with this pedal is really the presets. All of them (except the flute sound) have very strong fifths or duodecims, which makes the sounds very organ-like, but also reduces their usability. I found exactly one good sound for my use after a lot of knob-twiddling, and that is worth the price alone. This pedal should have had virtual drawbars instead of all these presets.

Decent quality. Switches are not the smoothest, but no problem. I use it to split the guitar signal into different signal paths, each going to different channels of my Twin Reverb. Tiny bit of leakage, but unproblematic in a live setting.

This pedal clones three classic Dan Armstrong effects, the Orange Squeezer, the Green Ringer and the Blue Clipper. They all sound great, and are greatly enhanced by the blend knobs. The filter knob works on the Clipper part, the comp knob is a bias control for the Squeezer. Sounds best between 10 and 11 o'clock, becomes extremely squashy around 12 and cuts out after 1 o'clock. This is intentional, as FETs have a somewhat unpredictable bias range. The Squeezer in itself isn't a very versatile compressor, but what it does, it does extremely well. The Ringer is a classic analog octave-up; in combination with the Clipper, it makes a decent octave-fuzz. Ring-modulating chaos results from playing anything but unisons and octaves.

The Clipper alone is very high-gain, and cleans up well from the guitar volume. Sounds somewhere in between a Big Muff and a MXR Distortion+. With the clipper just partially blended in with the compressor, the pedal is a great semi-dirty boost for the next gain stage. I use it to push a DOD Carcosa set to a slighly fuzzy medium-gain overdrive into a clean Twin Reverb.

Emulating tape flanger with the touch of a footswitch is a good idea, but does it work? Kind of, but not quite. Press the on button, and you get an approximation of two tape recorders in unison, where wow and flutter results in comb-filtering effects. In itself a really nice sound, though less subtle than actual tape recorders would be. Press the extra footswitch for that classic woosh effect. Which is cool, but not really that close to the real thing; it's too dirty and gritty. In addition, it would be useful to be able to go from no effect at all to a quick flanger, which isn't really possible. The pedal also lacks headroom at 9 volts, it distorts easily when pushed. Slightly better at 12 volts, probably even better at 18, but I have been unable to test that. It is also a bit noisy, this needs isolated and regulated DC power, or it will produce digital clock noise.

The best tuner for live use. The selectable buffered bypass is brilliant.

My Zvex 59 sound broke just before a gig, so I borrowed this from the drummer in my band (who is also a guitarist). Not only did it get me through that gig, it did the imploding Tweed amp sound better than the Zvex. Maybe not more realistic, but who cares. I immediately bought my own. This one is not just a fuzz, it goes from subtle, tweedy breakup to velcro fuzz to doomsday. I no longer have a conventional overdrive on my board, just this, a Tonebender Mk1 clone, and a Blue Clipper clone (VFE The Triplet). I can't believe how something so cheap can be this good.

Update: There is one flaw with this, at least for my use. The hali mode cuts a serious chunk of bass, great for going into an already overdriven amp. The demhe mode does the opposite, it gives you a considerable bass/low mid-boost. This makes your little practice amp sound like a beast, but into my Twin Reverb at stage volume, it is just too much. This pedal should have had a potentiometer instead of a two-way, so you could choose varying levels of bass cut/boost. That would have made it perfect.

If you want clean amplitude modulation, this pedal won't work. It colours the signal a lot, even with gain on zero. Turn down the tremolo, and you have another gain stage, actually. And a very good one at that. This pedal has a dedicated output transformer, giving great poweramp-like distortion.

The tremolo itself is great. The harmonic mode has much greater range than a brownface Fender does, but keeps the core sound. The amplitude mode mimics bias tremolo, and does it just right. The sound quality is excellent, if you can live with absolutely no headroom and amp-like colouration.

This pedal would be more versatile if bypassing the output transformer and other tone shaping circuits were possible, but I'm not complaining. Others might.

Extremely realistic sounds and lots of fun. Non-rotary effects less convincing. Stereo outputs should go directly to the PA, but through a very clean, flat-sounding amp (like a Blackface set to B=0 M=10 T=0), it works well for rehearsals and small gigs without a proper PA system. I use the Normal channel of my Twin for this, while the regular guitar signal goes to the so-called Vibrato channel. Most of the time, I use a EHX C9 in front of it. This setup makes it possible to play a quite convincing fake-organ through one channel, and guitar through the other. Or both combined.

This unit would have had a lot more sales potential if it was made to easily work with a guitar and amp setup. A mono output and an option to turn off cabinet simulation would have made things a lot easier. But that is not the primary focus of this great pedal, so it deserves every one of the five stars I'm giving it.

Tracking is quite good, swell mode is a nice bonus. Like all digital octave pedals, latency is an issue. Works well with octaves and fifths, but thirds starts to confuse it, and even sometimes fourths. Forget about seconds and septims. This is a cheap pedal, and digital noise is not well-filtered, or out-filtered at all. It definitely needs an isolated power source, but even then, high-pitched digital noise may be an issue with some pedal combinations. My VFE The Triplet makes the Tender Octaver whine, even if both have isolated power lines. Detracting a star because of this, digital pedals really should be properly filtered.

This is a high-end Tonebender Mark1 clone. Pedro García uses only the best components, and that is very audible. Extremely low noise, great sound. The mode switch changes the output capacitor, for a much thinner FZ-1 tone. Instant Satisfaction!

This is an emulation of a 1959 Fender Bandmaster (5E7). And it is among the most realistic tweed emulators I've heard. It's based on three-stage Zener diode clipping, giving a more tube-like response than back-to-back diode clipping. The 2 band EQ is subtle, but effective enough. Gain goes from mild colouring to aggressive and quite fuzzy. At max gain, lots of fuzzy bass dominates the signal in a nicely chaotic way, like a real tweed circuit does. With the gain at less than 12 o' clock, this could easily be an always on-pedal, nicely colouring the signal while retaining the top and bottom of the guitar signal.

Not a build for absolute beginners, but not too difficult.