guitarnerd's Reviews

Musical Distortion Pedal

I love this distortion pedal. It's very musical and easy to dial in. F & T switch makes it versatile for single coil and humbucker guitars. I've opened the chassis to check the components. There is a transformer, good quality components and neat wiring. The LED light is useful. Helps to indicate the sustain/attack of my playing. There is some noise when the pedal is on but it's negligible. I'd highly recommend this.

Great bass chorus. Works well with acoustic guitar

I use this in a praise & worship context. A nice chorus which I use during slow worship songs as a pad. Reduces the attack on the bass and allows it to be support for the keyboardist. Easy to dial in. LED indicator will blink according to in rate and the brightness of the LED varies according to the intensity. My bass tone does not thin out unlike the other chorus.

When paired with an acoustic guitar, it gives a nice shimmer. There's added sustains to the tone and some low mids boost. Used it for some praise songs as a boost or to get the guitar to cut through the mix.

Unfortunately it didn't pair well with my electric guitars as there's a loss in clarity. Too bad there's no blend knob. The internal circuit is well constructed. Doesn't draw much power and you can use it with a standard 9V.

Transparent sounding Workhorse!

One of the best transparent Acoustic Guitar Preamp in the market. There's a learning curve for this. Reading manuals and online videos didn't help much. But after some use, I managed to get the hang of it. I usually start this on neutral settings and tweak a little according (eg. some mids + presence for better clarity in the mix). An excellent choice for live use. My soundman loves this. Ground lift switch is effective to reduce hums. Boost toggle is extremely useful for plucking. I've run some effects through this unit via effects loop. Worked perfectly with Boss DD20 delay and chorus pedal. Battery indicator is a useful feature. The 9V battery lasts a handful of sets. I prefer using an external power adapter for a peace of mind. Power draw is relatively low so you can easily use standard guitar effects adapter or just tap on a 100mA output from your power supply unit.

I love the mute switch to silence the guitar inbetween breaks, avoid risk of unnecessary feedback. Everyone knows that the onboard tuner isn't very responsive. I'd usually mute my guitar look to snark clip tuner. It's rugged and comes with a nice carrying case. Weighs around 1kg.

Heavyduty and robust

Great board that's functional and practical

Great Pedalboard

Functional, lightweight. My record was 7-8 pedals on this board.

Good looper pedal with memory

There's 99 memory bank which you can expand further with a SD card. Good for home practice.

Excellent vibrato pedal that works well with bass!

It gives a nice fretless characteristic when paired with a bass guitar. Sounds great and I've not even downloaded toneprint! Love the small form factor.

Useful inexpensive pedal

Great multi-function pedal. Some patches are not bad. Zoom had recently released firmware update V3.0 which unlocks up to 172 effects. https://www.zoom-na.com/news/firmware-update-v30-ms-50g

Value for money and useful in situations when user has limited pedalboard space.

Great value for money

useful multi-function gadget when you need extra sounds. Zoom had recently released a V2 Firmware update which allows users to add more patches!

https://www.zoom-na.com/news/firmware-update-v20-ms-60b

The tuner function on this pedal is excellent. Responsive and detects my low B string

Great sounding analogue delay

Sounds really good. Love this pedal. Adds great textures when paired on acoustic guitar

Functional but bulky and noisy switch

I can hear the springs bouncing when I'm using this. Hope that manufacturers will consider using silent foot switch. Gets quite annoying when I'm trying to tap tempo. Sturdy but quite heavy and bulky.

Excellent Passive DI

Works well with bass guitar. Helps to reduce some noise from signal.

Affordable, accurate and responsive

One of the best clip tuner at this price point. The red model offers vibration and mic modes. Only issue is that the rubber piece on the grip falls off after some time. I would recommend an updated version of this tuner. Display is much clearer and improvements to the grip

http://www.snarktuners.com/products/super-tight

Works well on 5 string bass but expensive

So far the only clip tuner I've tried which is responsive to the low B string on a 5 string. But the user needs to toggle this into the bass mode.

Do note the slow boot up time... takes 3-4 seconds.... It's quite long especially during a live set and you wanna tune in between songs. Hence I'd still go for a snark when I need to tune my guitar. It power on instantly.

The LED display flips automatically according to the direction placed. But I prefer a 360 swivel of snark for position to the exact angle. Do note the display panel gets scratched easily.

I will recommend this for 5 string bass guitarists. But for applications such as acoustic/electric/4 string bass, snark offers good value..

Great tuner. Works well with 5 string bass

Responsive, accurate and works well on my low B string (had issues with other pedals) and it doesn't take up much space on the pedalboard.

Great compressor for fingerstyle playing

Love how it is user friendly. Intuitive knobs. Transparent sounding compressor and shines with fingerstyle. But the diamond does not offer a spectrum of compression ratio. Issue came when I needed more attack for slap/pop and the diamond was lacking.

Another consideration for potential buyers is that this requires 18V power. The power adapter that was bundled with this unit was faulty and I couldn't pass it to my friends to try (as they didn't have a suitable power supply). There's no battery compartment. This takes up some space on a pedaltrain mini. I use a Roscoe SKB (Ash body + maple neck) with 18V active preamp.

Versatile compressor but not built like a tank (Updated on 13/11/17)

Primarily used with my active bass guitar. Love the transparency of this pedal. Versatile adjustments for fingerstyle and slap/pop. But the controls aren't intuitive. Finally got it to work after reading the user manual.

Revising this review to comment on the pedal's electronics build. I was disappointed to find this pedal suddenly dead in my rig. What happened was that the screws on the input/output jack was lose. After tightening the screws, the jack moved and i suspect the soldering joint got disconnected. My 2007 unit was having scratchy pots. You can take this review as a pinch of salt since mine is an old unit. Not sure whether improvements has been made to construction.

Compact and lightweight. Some noise

Really neat package. Super lightweight. Not sure if it is really isolated. There was some noise coming out of my amp. Levels are negligible. There is 1 high power output that worked well for a DD20. Comes with 10 cables (same length).

Only issue is the power adapter cable. Flimsy and thin. This cable is also very short. Hope it lasts.

Revised Review after 7 years of usage

Got this back in 2014. Found it versatile with a bunch of useful cables. Fast forward to 2021, this unit gives out noise (literally coming out of the supply).

Relooked at the manual and Trex recommends to place this linear power supply away from effects to minimise noise. It's true as my Chameleon sits below the pedals. For years, there's noise from my 300mA MXR reverb pedal and 18V distortion/overdrive pedals. I've recently changed to a newer switching power supply and the board is finally dead silent.

Awesome pedal. Until noise issue started

Bought this brand new in 2016. Sounded great with acoustic and electric guitar. Only gripe is the noise that this gadget started creating in my effects chain this year. I tried running this using an isolated power supply, separate power adapter etc but those aren't working. Any suggestions?