Boss ME-33

For someone who isn't a guitarist (ok I "play" a little, but take heavy note of the large scale quotes) I certainly have owned a number of guitar related gear. Maybe it's because these devices make creating the recognizable sounds of electric guitar so easy. A little strat piped through a Vox Amp (actual or virtual) puts you right on the beach with the Ventures, and a splash of distortion covers a multitude of technical sins (especially in the studio where you can always do a retake).

Previous posts have included the tale of finding a vintage Ampeg Reverberocket tube amp in the garbage and my experiences with the Pod Line 6 multi-effects unit and the Roland PW-10 Wah pedal. And oh how I loved the guitar effects on the Roland VS-880. Let's not forget the MXR Phase-90 pedal. I've had tons of others, and I'll eventually get to them all.

This post, however, is about the ME-33, a Boss multi-effect pedal, complete with wah style expression for volume, wah and controlling other aspects of the effect. To have it all in one, no more multiple cords daisychaining a bunch of pedals.

And it worked pretty well. Honestly, I don't know if it stacked up to the individual effect pedals it supposedly included, I never had them all there to do some scientific A-B testing. All in all it was pretty sweet. It cost me about $179 and I think it was well worth it.

Downside: an overall smallness to the sound, somehow, lack of travel of the expression pedal, and limited parameters. Sure you could chain a whole bunch of effects, but you could only turn on and off three of those with the footswitches. In the end I came to the conclusion that I always seem to with guitar gear that's worth even a little something: "Hey, I'm not really a guitarist, I could use the money for some other gear." So I sold it.

Importantly, this pedal introduced me to ebay.com. I put it on there, my very first item up for sale, over ten years ago. There it sat, without bids, into the evening the sale was to end. I went to bed early, but in the morning someone had bid it up to about $400 bucks. Crazy, really, considering I paid less than half that. But the postal money order arrived in a week and I was hooked on ebay for good. (I still have perfect feedback).