So the first effects pedal in my arsenal well worth you checking out for creating modern day retro psychedelic / ambient sounds is the Zoom MS70 CDR which is in my opinion one of the best sounding digital pedals out there. I am not going to get into the whole analogue vs digital arguments, the bottom line is will something do the job you want it to do and is the listener really going to be criticising your sound based on the fact of which type of pedal you derived your final sound?
Firstly in this one multistomp pedal you have got 86 amazingly decent effects suitable for both guitar and bass. These cover loads of sounds with various "models" of chorus, delays & reverbs as well as a few other pedal sounds that I haven't figured a viable use for personally, but nonetheless are there for any future sonic experiments.
One great feature is, you have 50 presets which you can change, store and rename as you please. Each preset can utilise up to six different effects which can be chained together in any order... yep that's up to 6 pedals going all at once. Each effect can be altered with up to 9 controls via the pedal's on screen menu controls (depending on the effect) and the patch can be stored and if desired, renamed. In order for Zoom to keep the price point low, there is a compromise... Some effects need way more processing power than others and the pedal doesn't have unlimited processing power. What this means in real terms is that you can't always get the chain you want because you'll find a DSP Full message. However that said, to me it's not a huge problem, because everything else about the pedal blows this minor issue out the water and if you did want the ultimate chain, well you could be audacious and buy two of them...
The price point is below £100, so I couldn't justify buying separate pedals on my budget let alone 86, so as they say it was a no brainer for me.
Ok I am not going to go into a deep review about the pedal, there's loads of info out there... the main thing for me is does it satisfy my needs? In a word YES!!!!
I spent some time playing around and the things this pedal can do is pretty amazing and once you've designed a few presets you'll have created your own unique sounds. It also completely changed (in a good way) the boring sounds on an old keyboard I hadn't used for years, which I have plans to one day attempt to circuit bend.
The only other issue was that I couldn't save the presets on my PC because win xp is no longer supported but hey don't get me started on that!
