louis_schelfhout

Volume pot for lead circuit died within a year.

The Diamond J-Drive is a compact pedal reminiscent of old school garage-rock tones of the 70's. In general, this pedal does everything. You can roll in a small amount of drive without it sounding weak, or you can turn it all the way up and get some really warm gritty lead tones. I don't really use the tone switch anymore as I can't really hear the difference. The gain boost is an excellent addition which really tears whatever tone you just constructed apart.

I mainly use the Rat for fuzzy lead tones sometimes adding a bit of tremolo and reverb. For this it has a fat muffled sound especially when you roll off all your guitar tone and use your bridge pickup. Otherwise its pretty hard to find any other sound that really fits in with the rest of my board. The disadvantage of the Rat is that you can't stack it on top of another drive without making your sound really harsh. If you're dialing anything less than half off the filter it starts to sounds gross and just sort of becomes incomprehensible noise. That might be great if it's what you want, but if you like your licks to be distinguishable this won't always work.

When I was looking at buying this pedal a lot of reviewers warned of the lack of "drip" that this unit has in comparison to its competitors. I can clarify that the Spring King does truly lack this feature despite being a genuine spring tank so if that is something you NEED, you're better off looking for an alternative. The advantage of this tank however is its practicality. It's relatively small and fits on my board, easy to kick and create a splash, and sounds better than my amp's reverb (Fender Twin Reverb). I always have the tone fully dialed when I'm using the spring king and have the reverb dialed at about 1/2 to 3/4. Any more and its too drenched for lead. Some people complain about the noise this unit makes however I personally only noticed this when using a power supply that wasn't isolated. What noise there is I'd say is superficial. It also helps to add tremolo on top of this reverb if you're looking for that classic 60's surf tone, however the Spring King will still do fine without.

Steinberg's UR44 has been an excellent audio interface for my small studio. I've had it working on both Windows 10 and MacOS and because it is a relatively small unit I can take it with me when I'm not at home. Be aware that when you're switching between OS' you'll want to make sure you follow the setup guide from the manual otherwise you can run into driver issues which lead to the device not being recognised. I predominantly use it for tracking my synthesiser, drum machine, guitars and vocals and don't often use all the mic/line inputs at once but its nice to have the option of doing so and not having to continuously pull lines in and out to record things. You can run phantom power for all the microphone inputs which is handy if you're using condenser microphones. But of course, if you're planning on using more than 4 mics at once, this interface won't be for you. There are a few onboard effects and I've tried the reverb and compressor out but I wouldn't say they're any better than the plugin effects you'll find in your DAW. It works and does its job as a nice intermediate between a smaller and larger interface.

The Roland Gaia has been one of my favorite purchases and additions to my home studio. Spending your time creating the sounds you want is made very simple and really fun. I'd recommend it to anyone.

This bass has a very off-putting weight issue. The head stock feels far heavier than the body.

Korg's Electribe EMX-1 is a fun easy-to-use drum machine and sequencer with lots of sound design options. Since the EMX-1 has so many functions it is difficult to capture the capabilities of this machine in a short review. Therefore I will only discuss its key features. The drum part can hold 9 different sounds at a time which you load from the inbuilt sample library. You can effectively adjust anything you'd like for each part. Most importantly the volume, pitch and release. You can also add swing to each part which is controlled by a global swing value, however I find that it sounds rather crude. The synth part can hold 5 different sounds with a variety of oscillator options. You can either play notes using the step buttons as a keyboard, or program notes in a sequence. You can adjust the filter cutoff, resonance, attack and drive for either a low-pass, high-pass, band pass or band pass +. You can also modulate the depth of the pitch, oscillator shape, filter, amp and pan with an LFO which can be synced to the tempo. In terms of building beats/patterns, you can simply record what you play on the go, or program a sequence. A handy feature included which involves a bit of reading into is the motion sequencing which allows you to program any of the part controls per step. For example, if you'd like to program a hi-hat to sound more dynamic, you can program each hit of the hat to be a different volume. You also have the option of sending any part to a number of effects. I find the bpm-synced delay and EQ most useful. The reverb is RUBBISH. I'd say that the biggest limitation of the EMX-1 is the sample library. This machine was released over 20 years ago and the samples go to show that. There are 207 samples to pick from and I'd say a quarter of them are actually functional for a contemporary beat. I assume the EMX-1 was catered towards electronic musicians so a lot of the samples don't sound particularly organic and if you're trying to make anything outside of EDM, you'll find it can be quite hit or miss. It would have been nice if you could load your own samples on to the EMX-1 but I suppose Korg reserved that feature for its sister product the ESX-1 sampler. That said, you CAN make it work. It just takes a little more time and I'd argue that's what makes this machine so fun. You can plug and play, but I think you'll get more out of it when you start spending the time adjusting the sounds. I'd recommend this machine to anyone that is looking for a cool vintage drum machine/sequencer that isn't expecting to take things too seriously. There are plenty of modern options which will likely be more functional in the modern age but the EMX-1 still has enough tricks to be useful in the right context.