I am adding to my rack. I need some advice for a relatively inexpensive multi-effect

  • Thread starter Thread starter Malpine Walis
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Malpine Walis

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OK, I am mostly playing 60's/70's blues/prog rock type stuff. As matters stand, my gear is:

Three Bass guitars played into:

Groove tubes Trio (brown face)
Boss ME-50-B
Hartke 500 watt head
Genz Benz Neox 2x12 cab

Now the ME50B has really treated me right. It has great sounds and I used it without the GT trio for a few years just fine. However, I am now feeling a bit of GAS to see what I can do in place of the ME50B. My main nit is that it is a floor box and without a couple of extra floor boxes, changing presets would force me to bend over and use my fingers. Also, there is no display as such, so I only know which patch I am in because I am in it and I know what order they are stored in.

Now that I have the GT trio, this opens the possibility of a lesser rack mount effect unit. So that give you an idea of where I am going. If/when I need other types of distortion, I can still use the ME50B or any of my stomp boxes.

So after looking around and considering my needs, I have found the Rocktron Xpression. However, I want to know if I am missing something.
 
OK I got a Rocktron Xpression and a Lexicon MX 200.

Anticipating the question from anyone who does not know those specific items:

The Rocktron unit is about as simple as stuff can get without going to the point of having a single knob and many pages to mess with in programming it. It has six knobs and a few buttons. I have not yet looked at the buttons but since I am on day one here, that is fairly minor. The reason why I bought it was more for the knobs anyway.

Two of the knobs are for setting the input and output sound levels. Pretty obvious there.

The one knob that will see action on stage is for selecting which of 128 programs I am on. That in itself gets me past the nit I had with changing programs. As an aside, each program can be saved with a text name, so I can name my patches for each of the songs that I play.

The other three are not going to come into play on stage. They are for programming the thing.

The first is for selecting which effect is being edited.

The second is for selecting which parameter is being edited.

The third is for setting the value of that parameter.

As far as a day one review, I can only go by the factory settings which are all pretty plain. In fact, it is not even really obvious what difference there is between them. I will have to do a proper review later on when I have put some time into the thing.

The Lexicon unit I bought mostly because it has two DSP processors that run in parallel. It has 32 effects but the main reason for buying this unit was that 16 of them are reverbs and 8 are delays. The others are the usual phaser/flanger/chorus type of stuff but since I have that stuff earlier in my signal chain, I don't see them being used too often.

As with the Lexicon unit, the factory settings are nothing to get excited over but who really cares on that point. I will find sounds that are to my liking later.
 
FWIW, the Line 6 M13s are AWESOME units! Not a rack effect by any means (although I plan on racking mine up ;) ), but amazingly stupidly simple to use and sound great to boot! No tone suckage either.

Brandon
 
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