BOSS DIGITAL DELAY DD-3

UPDATED, WITH SOUND CLIPS
Behold, one of the most popular Digital Delay Pedal you've ever come across, it's the Boss Digital Delay DD-3. It's one of the most used digital delay pedal on the world. Popular artists such as Eric Johnson, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, and many others use this pedal to get that crystal clear delay sound with no added anything. This pedal does not belong to me but I'm going to have it on my pedalboard for some time.

Digital vs Analog
As we all know, there's a significant difference between a digital delay and analog delay. Apart from the circuitry, the tone between the two delays is quite different. Analog delay is known for its lush, warm, wobbly, saturated lo-fi repeats that sometimes resemble an old tape echo delay. On the other hand, digital delay provides clean, pristine clear, hi-fi repeats that really aims for simply clearer repeats. Both have totally different feeling although they can be used on same situation. I still prefer analog delay for its wobbly-ness but this DD-3 provides an extra range that can further enhance your sonic projection.

What's so special about it?
You can read all the technical details on the website, I'm not going to include them in here. Anyway, there are many ways to use this delay pedal; it's quite flexible, unlike my analog delay pedals. Paul Gilbert used to store some lick in it and call it down using the "Hold" mode, while Eric Johnson replaces his Echoplex tape echo with this pedal just to simply get that 300-500ms repeats. Some people set the delay time very short and get that slap-back reverb-kind-of repeats; some others set the time very long and get that glorious long delay lead tone which everyone loves to hear. Very versatile indeed!!

Anything bad?
It's not true bypass if that's your main concern, but it doesn't suck too much bypass tone so if you only have one of these on your pedalboard, you should be fine. When engaged, your real tone will get darken a little bit; while this will make your guitar sound fatter, actually some people hate it because their high end got lost and they cannot get that clicky pick attack sound when this pedal is engaged. Other concern includes automatic turn on every time I power it up using my One Spot 9V pedal power. I never tried the using it with battery so I can't tell you if there's any battery concern.

Is it worth the price?
This one comes at around $110.00, quite expensive but sounds pretty good. I say it's worth it and I may even say this one is a "must-have" on your pedalboard.

From 0 to 10?
I can say 10, but remember to try it first and see if it matches your tone. A great pedal to experiment with.

CLICK HERE FOR SOUND CLIP. I hope you enjoy this post, cheers and God bless :)

RC BOOSTER

Yes, it's finally here in the blog! The ultimate clean boost machine is now available for reviewing. After spending some time with this pedal, I'm finally able to share some cool stuffs that this pedal has to offer.

Xotic Tremendous Trio

First, let me explain the concept of Tremendous Trio by Xotic. The Tremendous Trio are actually three booster/overdrive pedals that Xotic has to offer: BB Preamp, AC Booster and RC Booster. You may wonder, what's the difference between the tree? They are all almost identical, they have similar control knobs and they're all booster pedals.

Well, they are in fact very different...

... in terms of gain level, sound characteristic and function. A cranked up RC booster will sound like a near-breakup vintage tube amp on a clean channel while an AC booster will deliver Tube Screamer like quality with more warmness; as we already know, BB preamp has the highest gain and can really drive an amp into a high saturation level. In terms of sound characteristic: RC booster is clean and smooth, AC booster is somewhat more mid-scooped compared to a TS and BB preamp have the most amount of warmness compared to the others.

RC Booster in more detail

I said above that RC Booster is clean and smooth: it's not just clean, it's TRANSPARENT. That means, you can use it as a clean boost to increase your volume level without adding gain or altering your tone. You can add some bass or treble depending on what you want but you can really keep your original tone as it is. This is very useful for a clean lead tone where you need extra volume boost.

Personally, I use the RC Booster only on the clean channel. When I tried to use it on an already overdriven amp, I can't really get a volume boost and I don't really need to get extra gain out of it. I once tried to use this as a tone modifier to make my single coil sounds warmer and it did a great job on doing that. Well, there's actually many ways that you can use this pedal to suit your needs. Leave it on all the time with minimum amount of gain and added level increase, it will help to bring out your long-cable-degraded tone back to life while boosting your tone.

Please remember

This won't give you a massive amount of distortion as I mentioned before, so don't really expect this pedal to work on a high-gain situation although it will still surely provide something useful in that case. This also doesn't work as a compressor although it can boost your output and add some sustain. Don't get disappointed when it doesn't provide you with enough gain and massive amount of compression, it's not really what it's designed for. Remember that there are AC Booster and BB Preamp that provide more compression and more gain compared to this baby.

Is it worth?

Current retail price of around $170.00, it's an expensive pedal for sure. But for its true bypass capability, boutique quality, tone enhancement features and unique functions, I would say that this thing worth every penny. Clean boost and tone enhancer is not really something that you may want, but give this pedal a try and you'll surely know why Xotic made this pedal.

From 0 to 10?

9.5. Cheaper price can bring it to 10 for sure. Xotic is a very expensive boutique pedal maker, but for a price this high you'll get something with a very high quality.

Sound clip: CLICK HERE, first original signal then RC booster with minimum gain maximum volume, and then RC booster maximum gain and volume, I backed off the treble a little bit by the way.

Cheers and God bless :)

MORLEY VOLUME PLUS

First of all, pardon me for the lack of update for these couple of days. Good news: I got my new pedalboard and everything is installed together and it's ready for audio recording. Just need to find some time to record A/B comparisons of using pedal and no pedal.

Transparent volume pedal

At this opportunity I'll review a Morley Volume Plus pedal. Before I even do that, let me first say that my volume pedal hunting doesn't go so well. As we all know, most volume pedal uses potentiometer that causes signal degradation due to increased resistance of the overall signal on your signal chain. That's TONE SUCKING basically. Well, this pedal isn't sucking any of your tone(or almost not sucking tone, I can't really hear the difference!).

Instead of using a potentiometer, this pedal uses optical sensor or something like that. This is great because a pot will eventually wear out and need to be replaced besides its nature of being a tone sucking factor. Thus, using the optical sensor makes this pedal a reasonably transparent volume pedal. I'm trying to A/B with and without pedal and see how much tone sucking is going on: I can't tell haha !

Swelling action

Although the volume pedal is transparent, it isn't really good for accurate volume swelling due to the fact that the rocker's angle isn't too wide. However, there's a switch on the bottom right of the pedal that actually turns on the "minimum volume" adjustment with the knob on the bottom left to adjust the minimum volume that you want as you put the rocker to its lowest position. This will help you get a more precised swelling or even do a rhythm/lead switch by moving the rocker.

Nonetheless, the mechanic moving part of the pedal is smooth enough so you can get that friction-free movement when you use this pedal. I'm still trying to figure out how to adjust the rocker's tension so that I can have it a little bit harder.

Built quality

The casing is very good, the battery compartment is easy to access, nothing really to complain except for two things:

- The size of this pedal will eat a lot of space on your pedal board. This thing is so huge, it has the same size of three small-sized MXR pedals combined together. Yikes !!

- You can't really "stand" on the rocker. What I mean is you can't literally put your foot on top of the rocker and kind of put your body weight above this pedal. It doesn't really have that strong feeling like when you stand on top of a wah pedal.

Is it worth?

Usual price is $90.00. It's totally worth! It's on the same price range of the other volume pedals.

From 0 to 10

I give this pedal an 8.9. It needs to have smaller footprint and stronger metal enclosure. But actually that's a bit too harsh, I can still give this pedal a 9.5 to be honest for its transparency.

Cheers and God bless :)