woo hoo! NO DELAY!

Wes Inman · 2004-12-19T21:55:48Z

Well, I received my new Zoom GFX-1 pedal yesterday. I spent hours on it last night. I like it a lot. Zoom GFX-1I know I just got it, but I gave it a real workout last night. Here is a review.First of all, lo and behold, there is no delay between patches! Woo Hoo! I couldn't be happier. I was really beginning to believe that all of these multi-effects pedals had a delay. My old Zoom pedal had one. But not this baby! That alone makes it fantastic in my book. It is small. It is only about 12" wide and 6" deep. I can almost completely cover it with my foot. That is not a complaint. I wanted a small pedal because I sing. I have to put the pedal between me and the mic. This does not take any room at all. So I like that. And the footswitches are just far enough apart to where you can easily step on one without hitting another. The whole thing is made of metal including the input and output jacks. It is a cool purple color. The expression pedal is plastic, but seems to be very well made. It operates flawlessly (so far). The GFX-1 runs on 4 AA batteries. It has an on-off switch so you don't have to unplug from the input jack to save your batteries. I had a 9V 300mA adaptor from Radio Shack which is the perfect match for this thing. It has 10 banks A through J. Each bank has 4 patches, 1 though 4. It came with 40 patches preset already. They are pretty cool, although most of them are very metal oriented. Many sound very similar to each other. But there are some nice overdrives and quite a few clean patches. The distortion patches were a little loud and the clean patches were a little too low in volume. My first editing was to slightly turn the distortions down, and the clean patches up a little. Easy. In fact, editing this thing is super easy. You just turn the dial to whatever parameter you want to edit. It shows the current setting. Then you just press the Value buttons up or down. What is great is that you hear the changes as you make them. With my old Digitech you had to hit a button to listen to the new setting, and hit another to return to the edit menu. But with this you hear the changes as you make them. That is nice. To change banks up you step on 3 and 4 at the same time. To go down a bank you step on 1 and 2 at the same time. If you step on any switch twice it bypasses the pedal so you can use your amp or other effects. If you hold a switch down after hitting it twice the tuner kicks in. The expression pedal is nice. You can get some great Whammy effects. I really like the sound of the Wahs too. You can use the pedal as a volume control, or what is really cool is that you can use the pedal to adjust gain on any distortion patch. So, you can bring a distortion down to a clean sound, step on the pedal and bring it up to full distortion. This makes 1 patch into 2! As usual, many of the patches are way cranked up. I will have to reduce the gain on many to use live. But it is so simple to do. You can get just about any sound you want out of this thing. It is not a modeler at all, although is has quite a few cab imulations that sound really nice. The acoustic guitar simulation is very good. So is this as good as a $400 Digitech, Line 6, or Boss? Probably not. But to me it is better. 40 patches is more than enough for my simple mind. This thing is just right for a gig. You can have a clean patch with effects, go to a nice crunch overdrive, go to a nice distortion for rhythm, and then a patch set up just for lead guitar. And no delay! I like it.

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Wes Inman

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Topic starter 24/11/2005 5:07 pm

kingpatzer

I guess you can teach an old dog a new trick. Over the past year I have experimented with compression. Now, I do use it on some patches, mainly to get a little more sustain. It can make solos sound a little more fluid. But I do not like too much compression. It just flattens out everything. You cannot (or it is very difficult) to put nuance into your playing. That is important to me. I am not a super advanced technical type of guitarist. I rely on feel, and that is what I do well. I play soft, I play loud, I try to milk a little feedback out of a note. I will wobble a string just to get the sound of the string on the fret (think intro to Foxy Lady).
So, I like to be able to pull little nuances out of the guitar.

But I admit, compression can be good for some patches. :D

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Wes

If you know something better than Rock and Roll, I'd like to hear it - Jerry Lee Lewis

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