Live PA FX

I’ve recently been buying some of the Joyo guitar pedals. These things came onto the scene a few years ago after many years of DOD/Digitech and Boss/Roland pedal dominance. The guitar pedal market never ceases to fascinate me with so many botique pedal manufacturers popping up all the time and now also many overseas manufacturers jumping into the game.

The Joyo pedals turned out to mostly be ok pedals, with some standouts. I’d previously tried a few Behringer knockoffs as well as some of the Danelectro pedals which were low-budget plastic versions of some more famous circuits. The Joyo pedals were far and above any of the budget pedals I’d tried up to that point.

I’ve had the venerable Zoom 505II multi-fx pedal for many years, and before that the Digitech RP-6. None of these are particularly great at anything but it’s nice to have a few different FX in one place without a lot of patching.

Later on I got an updated Zoom pedal, the G1X Four. I also got a few of the Line6 stompbox modelers. The M5 are compact and have MIDI inputs to sync delay times. I really only use the M5 boxes for the delays. The delay algorithms are the same as what is in the Line6 Delay Modeler, which is a great but bulky pedal. Looks like there is a MKII version now that I should check out.

So all of these pedals were good at somethings and had their place in many of my rigs. I also experimented with small mixers with onboard FX. These are convenient but seem to have universally bad delays. Best kept to a little room reverb or slap-back duty.

This brings me all the way back to the import pedals. Time marches on and the progress of consumer electronics is relentless. Somehow the music tech industry is stuck in a time warp often. Well, some company called Sonicake is making tiny FX boxes.

The number of features in newer boxes is astounding. I’m a little skeptical about newish features like remember when companies were making interfaces for the old iPhone multi-pin connector? those devices are pretty much useless at this point. Even if you kept an old phone to use them with you can’t update the software and the app store becomes useless at some point. I suppose if the apps were already installed you could use them indefinitely. You can’t get away from this completely. There are plenty of G4 Macs running protools still.

Anyway back to the Sonicake. I bought one since it was around the price point where it makes sense to just buy one and see. It has Bluetooth. It has USB-C. It has a looper. It has MIDI support (over BT and USB). It has impulse response loading. I’m forgetting some other things. Point is, even though these are features doesn’t mean they are that useful for a box like this. There are little details that make features not useful sometimes. I find that this happens when companies that haven’t been making audio gear for decades can miss how professionals actually use the gear. Things like switching effects pre-post fader or just the ability to get a raw unprocessed signal in or out of the device.

I haven’t run into any show stoppers yet here. The “monitor” feature is a little confusing. And when you turn down the levels of things -20db is the lowest you can go, which effectively seems like it’s “off” but I’m not sure yet. Playing BT audio results in a doubled time-delayed audio unless the monitor section is turned completely down. I think the best way to use this with a DAW is to keep the local monitoring completely turned down. Confusingly you can still hear the effect when not connected to the DAW so maybe it’s doing something that I don’t fully understand yet.

So to sum up, this thing is tiny, stereo, has a good ping-pong delay (which makes it a replacement for the M5 for me) has a working MIDI implementation… the list goes on. I think I might get a second one for my live setup.