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).

Roland PW-10 V-Wah

My Pod Line 6 gave way to the Roland PW-10 Wah pedal. This thing models distortion AND Wah. I really like Roland's modeling, actually. I'm not the only one: BOSS pedals are crazy popular (Boss/Roland: same company) despite the fact that you pay a lot for something that basically does one thing, albeit does it really well and from inside of a super roadworthy metal casing.

The PW-10 did a few things - it had 8 of those Roland effects in there and modeled wahs. It was a big, rock solid metal box of a thing too, which lead foot here appreciated.

Despite it's armored exterior, it's a nuance thing. Totally noiseless due to the fact that it uses some sort of optical system, and great models, I thought, of all the classic wahs.

All in all it was much simpler and more direct than the Pod Line 6. I'm a simple man, and I like gear that's simple to use. Not that the Pod wasn't, it just had more flavors than I needed. You can still get these for $125, new. That is a deal considering the individual boss distortion effects this contains, if added up would cost much, much more. While it does "less" than the plastic pedals from Zoom, for example, it does it's thing better than they do, and is built so much way better. Oh yea add the wah. Deal.

Pod Line 6

Of course it was candy apple red. (I'm into b/w photography, however, so you'll need to use your imagination).

Amp modeling was a sci-fi thing at a certain point. Imagine: Run the response of popular amps and cabinets though some kind of computer analysis that enables you to recreate what it does to the sound of any guitar. No tubes, no heavy lifting! Of course it's not the real thing, but it's pretty good, and importantly predictable, and able to be reproduced easily. I first encountered it in my VS-880 digital 8 track's effects card, which could model popular amp and microphone responses and apply them to your recordings.

The pretty amazing Pod Line 6 V2 cost me $199 dollars, and it modeled really well, I thought — a great effects machine for electric guitar (or voice, for that matter). You can see from the picture the many amp models available. You could tweak those presets. And there was some kind of software librarian available, I seem to recall.

I'm not a real guitarist, I just play one in the studio, so any kind of artificial enhancement totally helped. I can't think of anything wrong with this except that I longed for a Wah pedal and to hook Line 6's add-ons to this started to make it an expensive proposition. I got rid of it and bought a Roland PW-10 Wah pedal which you can read about next.

BOSS ME-30

Let's face it, after a bit of practice, any 12 year old can hit an Em power chord on their Chinese built Stratocaster and sound reasonably cool. A soup of distortion will forgive a plethora of sloppy fingering sins. And these days lots of effects pedals are available to give you an incredible palette of ear candy on the cheap.

Hardly a guitarist, I truly appreciate playing by someone who does it well, but lean heavily on sonic enhancement when I play and record guitar myself. My stomp box chain eventually grew to compressor-distortion-chorus-delay-noise gate and required scores of deep knee bends to tweak those knobs and hundreds of 9-volt batteries a month. Arthritis kicked, my tongue became numb from checking batteries and I grew frustrated searching for that combination of knob positions that sounded so good 2 minutes ago.

The BOSS-ME30 seemed plasticy but promised a dozen or more Boss pedal effects under the hood, and was totally programable. Once home, it was actually more solid than it looked in the pictures. It's not idea for performance since tremolo, chorus, flanger pitch shifter — all the timebased effect, as I recall, were under one switch, all the distortions under another, and so on. It wasn't exactly like having all 22 effects (or whatever the number was) strung together; you weren't free to turn one off or on as you wanted as if you actually had all the pedals hooked up in a chain.. But you could make the combinations you needed and just switch up to another patch.

For me it was great. My crappy Fernandes suddenly had 100 personalities (well, 30 anyway) and recordings sounded better. Mostly it was really fun to play.

Eventually I bought a Roland VS-880 digital multitrack and the effects board in there had great patches for guitar along with the added value of them being saved into your song files and being programable in the mix. (Actually I'd recommend an old VS880 with the effects board, or VS880ex, fx built in, as a great effects unit, that happens to have 8 track digital recording included).

I decided I didn't need the ME30 anymore and thought I try that ebay aution site I'd been hearing about to get back some of the $200+ I'd paid for the Boss. To my utter astonishment the ME30 went for almost $400 at auction, far more than I'd paid for it (and I became an instant ebay fanatic).

MXR phase 90

Purchased: Used, 1990 or so, for $15. Very cool classic phaser. Nice.

Just look a the brilliant user interface, a.k.a. knob. This was good for one reason only, its sound.


What happened to it? I sold it on ebay a few years later for about $75.