marnold
Reverend Rawk
- Joined
- Oct 15, 2005
- Messages
- 7,152
- Reaction score
- 25
Color me surprised! I went to my homebrew club's meeting yesterday and when I got home, there was my EX-7! Apparently DHL delivers on Saturdays. Who knew? One thing that immediately struck me is that someone at DigiTech has a problem with gauging sizes of things. The pedal is roughly the size of a standard wah-wah pedal. The box it comes in is a little less than four times bigger. The manual, on the other hand, it teeny--3" x 4" (7.5 cm x 10.5 cm for you metric folk).
The pedal is quite heavy and made almost entirely of metal. It seems very rugged. You could probably beat an intruder to death with it. There are two inputs: one for the guitar and one for the optional foot switch. There are two outputs: one for going out to an amp, another for going directly to a mixer (which adds in cabinet emulation). You can also rig it up to output in stereo to a mixer or two amps. It comes with its own power supply--it cannot be run on battery power.
First off, don't do what I did and plug your guitar into the foot switch input. If you turn it on like that with the first model selected, it goes into calibration mode, which is very confusing. Well, it's confusing if you don't realize that you are in calibration mode. Add to that the several beers I had at the homebrew club meeting and you see my problem.
Anyway, I like the Cry Baby wah a lot. The sound is exactly what I was looking for in a wah pedal. The XP300 aka Space Station model is very cool and very easy to get some interesting sounds out of. My guess is that you could use this to play Van Halen's "1984" on guitar alone.
The Whammy model is pretty cool for doing some harmony solos or doing whammy bar-like effects on my hard tail guitars. There aren't anywhere near as many options as there are on the original Whammy pedal, but most of the big ones are here.
I turned on the Uni-Vibe model and immediately thought of Robin Trower's "Bridge of Sighs." That model sounds quite a bit like the recordings I've heard of artists using it. The Leslie, to my ears, sounds better than the rotary effect on my AD30VT. I have no idea if it actually sounds like a Leslie but the reviews online have been quite positive. The only effect I really haven't figured out is the flanger. I'll have to fiddle with that one some more.
Some reviews say that you can't use the distortion models (the same ones that are on the Distortion Factory pedal) alone. That's only partially true. If you select the Whammy model and set the wet/dry mix all the way to dry, you can play with the distortions to your heart's content. I haven't messed with the distortions much yet. The TS-9 model sounds somewhat like my Behringer, although with less drive. I like the Boss Metal Zone and Big Muff models. The Big Muff is more of a fuzzy distortion which seems like it would be really cool for old Sabbath stuff.
I tried plugging my Vox foot switch into the EX-7. The DigiTech foot switch is three-button but the Vox is only two. I've got to play with it a bit more to find out what things the Vox foot switch actually changes. I would think that if you were to use this pedal in a live situation, you'd want the extra foot switch. At home by myself it's not a big deal.
For those of you who are concerned about running a modeling effect into a modeling amp (viz my AD30VT), there have been no problems so far. I've been running it into the Boutique CL model with the effects on the amp bypassed.
So far, I'm really happy with this pedal. Most places online have it for $199. I managed to get it for $149 on eBay brand new from Waddell's Drums (no affiliation, yadda, yadda). That makes the price much easier to swallow. When you consider how much it would cost to get all of these pedals separately, it doesn't seem so bad at all. I will continue to play with the various settings. Hopefully this week I'll have some sound clips posted. Until then, you can check out DigiTech's EX-7 demo or the sound clips on MF.
The pedal is quite heavy and made almost entirely of metal. It seems very rugged. You could probably beat an intruder to death with it. There are two inputs: one for the guitar and one for the optional foot switch. There are two outputs: one for going out to an amp, another for going directly to a mixer (which adds in cabinet emulation). You can also rig it up to output in stereo to a mixer or two amps. It comes with its own power supply--it cannot be run on battery power.
First off, don't do what I did and plug your guitar into the foot switch input. If you turn it on like that with the first model selected, it goes into calibration mode, which is very confusing. Well, it's confusing if you don't realize that you are in calibration mode. Add to that the several beers I had at the homebrew club meeting and you see my problem.
Anyway, I like the Cry Baby wah a lot. The sound is exactly what I was looking for in a wah pedal. The XP300 aka Space Station model is very cool and very easy to get some interesting sounds out of. My guess is that you could use this to play Van Halen's "1984" on guitar alone.
The Whammy model is pretty cool for doing some harmony solos or doing whammy bar-like effects on my hard tail guitars. There aren't anywhere near as many options as there are on the original Whammy pedal, but most of the big ones are here.
I turned on the Uni-Vibe model and immediately thought of Robin Trower's "Bridge of Sighs." That model sounds quite a bit like the recordings I've heard of artists using it. The Leslie, to my ears, sounds better than the rotary effect on my AD30VT. I have no idea if it actually sounds like a Leslie but the reviews online have been quite positive. The only effect I really haven't figured out is the flanger. I'll have to fiddle with that one some more.
Some reviews say that you can't use the distortion models (the same ones that are on the Distortion Factory pedal) alone. That's only partially true. If you select the Whammy model and set the wet/dry mix all the way to dry, you can play with the distortions to your heart's content. I haven't messed with the distortions much yet. The TS-9 model sounds somewhat like my Behringer, although with less drive. I like the Boss Metal Zone and Big Muff models. The Big Muff is more of a fuzzy distortion which seems like it would be really cool for old Sabbath stuff.
I tried plugging my Vox foot switch into the EX-7. The DigiTech foot switch is three-button but the Vox is only two. I've got to play with it a bit more to find out what things the Vox foot switch actually changes. I would think that if you were to use this pedal in a live situation, you'd want the extra foot switch. At home by myself it's not a big deal.
For those of you who are concerned about running a modeling effect into a modeling amp (viz my AD30VT), there have been no problems so far. I've been running it into the Boutique CL model with the effects on the amp bypassed.
So far, I'm really happy with this pedal. Most places online have it for $199. I managed to get it for $149 on eBay brand new from Waddell's Drums (no affiliation, yadda, yadda). That makes the price much easier to swallow. When you consider how much it would cost to get all of these pedals separately, it doesn't seem so bad at all. I will continue to play with the various settings. Hopefully this week I'll have some sound clips posted. Until then, you can check out DigiTech's EX-7 demo or the sound clips on MF.
That will probably change as I get over the "gee whiz" period of owning this pedal.
The Uni-vibe and Leslie sounds are great and full sounding. I like the Clyde wah a lot and some of the distortions are kinda neat. I finally figured out how to use the pedal it was difficult at first and yeah Marnold I too plugged my guitar into the footswitch when I first tried it. hahahaha
