If you're after something cheap, simple, and MIDI controllable, the TC Electronic G-Sharp is a very good option. It's designed specifically for guitar and uses knobs instead of buttons wherever it can.
The limitation is that you can only have one reverb, plus either a modulation or a delay. But how many effects do you really need at once? Usually I don't want to mess with the purity of my tone too much, so the G-Sharp was just the ticket.
I bought mine from Thomann.de for £165, which included a 3-button (non-MIDI) footswitch. An absolute bargain!
-does this unit have comp as well??I have a buddy interested in checking one out
....how do you like the flanger and phaser??these are his other concerns
thanks
No - it doesn't have compression (it's difficult to see how they'd do it without having effects loops in it, since compression traditionally comes before overdrive).
I'm also not very well qualified to talk about phasing and flanging because they're my least favourite modulation effects (I mean in general - not just in the G-Sharp). They need a bit of tweaking to get them sounding okay (to my ears anyway), but seem to be fairly high quality. The phasers are very vowel-like and flanger does the jet-plane woosh convincingly. One thing I've noticed is that they both sound weird when the depth is set high - kind of drunken and off-pitch. For my money I'd use them as subtle effects rather than full-on warbling.
I prefer the tremolos (a wonderful, hypnotic pulse) and the "vibra" (which gives an organ-like vibrato). The delays are great, with various levels of degradation in the signal, from pristine clean to tape decay to lo-fi, which is even more mangled on the repeats.
You're spoilt for choice on the reverbs - everything from the subtlest room reflection to a cavernous cathedral. There's a very useful pre-delay knob which places a pause before the reverb starts, allowing your original signal to come through clearly without being swamped by its own reverb.
I like that TC have really thought this unit through and put in some genuinely useful things while trying to keep it simple. It has a couple of quirks (changing up or down a patch requires two button presses on the main unit, although it's only one press of the footswitch; you can't have patch change and tap tempo on the footswitch at the same time) but I'm very happy with it as an all-in-one reverb/delay/modulation box. I've potentially saved a fortune on stompboxes, while also avoiding the button-pressing hell that plagues a lot of multi-fx. This thing just lets you get on with it.
