Zoom G2 Four FX Processor Pedal
- Thread starter Lysander
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KingsXJJ
Shredder
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Nine!
Lysander
Shredder
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PLEASE. It needs at least three toggle switches and seven sliders.
Lysander
Shredder
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I have to say, it's a really hard sell for the Zoom G2 Four...
...but at the same time, i'm pretty shocked by how good units in the $200 range are sounding these days. I shit you not, you could take those JCM 800 tones from either Zoom or Nux, put them in any record from the past 40 years, and no one would be able to tell the difference.
...but at the same time, i'm pretty shocked by how good units in the $200 range are sounding these days. I shit you not, you could take those JCM 800 tones from either Zoom or Nux, put them in any record from the past 40 years, and no one would be able to tell the difference.
Bob Zaod
Rock Star
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I concur.
Boudoir Guitar
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That's the special edition version that comes with a plastic cover
pipelineaudio
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Even the cheapest of the zoom interfaces use their really good drivers, its amazing how different these two lines are
Sascha Franck
Rock Star
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Gotta defend Zoom a bit here - and yes, I'm actually considering one of these to replace an HX Stomp on my pedalboard (note: I'm only using the Stomp as a delay/verb and occasional modulation FX unit, the rest kinda gets wasted).
IMO on-unit-editing is just excellent with the Zoom units. I'm still keeping an MS-50G on my board because of that. The way they managed to assign double functionality to the knobs, the way the first page of the FX blocks is laid out - you can edit things extremely quickly here (well ok, in the video of Leo Gibson, scrolling doesn't look too great, but that only seems to be true for the initial FX selection).
Then, unlike with some units of the competition, you can fill the blocks with any FX you want. That's pretty great as you can build rather complexed just-FX chains. Sure, no parallel processing as in the Stomp, still nice.
Also, as I'm comparing it to the Stomp anyway: The way Zoom laid out the first 3 (MS50) or 4 (later units such as this here) parameters that you can always access without page flipping, is excellent. And that's something Line 6 *completely* messed up with the Stomp (with almost all blocks, mission critical parameters are on page 2, such as mix for most delays and level for most drives, let alone amps), which makes onboard editing incredibly slower. This is in fact quite an important thing to me (and fwiw, I already suggested an improvement on Ideascale).
They got the encoder ballistics right, too (they're soft-clicking when dialing), whereas I absolutely disklike how this has changed in the HX-verse with 3.5 (and yes, I know I'm pretty much the only persom on earth to prefer the old way - but I need them for finetunings rather than for drastic changes, which I'm doing beforehand in HX Edit).
As far as FX quality goes, IMO Zoom is doing fine. No, their amp modeling isn't all too great, NUX is likely doing a lot better (even if I find most amps to be too compressing on my Amp Academy). But the FX are quite decent. And even within the MS-50G there's some stuff you can't find on the Stomp, such as the Ice Delay (defenitely not even remotely Strymon-ish but very useful if you mix it with a quality delay/verb following) and some filter FX types.
Finally, while I can't tell about this very unit, converter quality is pretty decent on the MS-50G, latency is super low (somewhat less than 1.5ms if I recall my measuring correctly), so even daisy chaining isn't causing troubles too quickly.
In a nutshell, in case they kept the good things from the older MS units, this could make up for a rather interesting unit in another context but just amp modeling.
Couldn't care less about the ugly design, my entire pedalboard is built around usability rather than catwalk-compatibility.
IMO on-unit-editing is just excellent with the Zoom units. I'm still keeping an MS-50G on my board because of that. The way they managed to assign double functionality to the knobs, the way the first page of the FX blocks is laid out - you can edit things extremely quickly here (well ok, in the video of Leo Gibson, scrolling doesn't look too great, but that only seems to be true for the initial FX selection).
Then, unlike with some units of the competition, you can fill the blocks with any FX you want. That's pretty great as you can build rather complexed just-FX chains. Sure, no parallel processing as in the Stomp, still nice.
Also, as I'm comparing it to the Stomp anyway: The way Zoom laid out the first 3 (MS50) or 4 (later units such as this here) parameters that you can always access without page flipping, is excellent. And that's something Line 6 *completely* messed up with the Stomp (with almost all blocks, mission critical parameters are on page 2, such as mix for most delays and level for most drives, let alone amps), which makes onboard editing incredibly slower. This is in fact quite an important thing to me (and fwiw, I already suggested an improvement on Ideascale).
They got the encoder ballistics right, too (they're soft-clicking when dialing), whereas I absolutely disklike how this has changed in the HX-verse with 3.5 (and yes, I know I'm pretty much the only persom on earth to prefer the old way - but I need them for finetunings rather than for drastic changes, which I'm doing beforehand in HX Edit).
As far as FX quality goes, IMO Zoom is doing fine. No, their amp modeling isn't all too great, NUX is likely doing a lot better (even if I find most amps to be too compressing on my Amp Academy). But the FX are quite decent. And even within the MS-50G there's some stuff you can't find on the Stomp, such as the Ice Delay (defenitely not even remotely Strymon-ish but very useful if you mix it with a quality delay/verb following) and some filter FX types.
Finally, while I can't tell about this very unit, converter quality is pretty decent on the MS-50G, latency is super low (somewhat less than 1.5ms if I recall my measuring correctly), so even daisy chaining isn't causing troubles too quickly.
In a nutshell, in case they kept the good things from the older MS units, this could make up for a rather interesting unit in another context but just amp modeling.
Couldn't care less about the ugly design, my entire pedalboard is built around usability rather than catwalk-compatibility.
Lysander
Shredder
- Messages
- 2,247
Multi-effects pedals have come such a long way over the last 20 years. Anyone want to tell Zoom that?
(...)
Combining obsolete hardware, awful sounds and baffling limitations, Zoom’s latest multi-effects pedals are overpriced, underpowered and completely outclassed by the competition.
guitar.com
(...)
Combining obsolete hardware, awful sounds and baffling limitations, Zoom’s latest multi-effects pedals are overpriced, underpowered and completely outclassed by the competition.
Zoom G2 Four and G2X Four review: an unwelcome journey to the past
Multi-effects pedals have come such a long way over the last 20 years. Anyone want to tell Zoom that?
guitar.com
Bob Zaod
Rock Star
- Messages
- 2,872
Multi-effects pedals have come such a long way over the last 20 years. Anyone want to tell Zoom that?
(...)
Combining obsolete hardware, awful sounds and baffling limitations, Zoom’s latest multi-effects pedals are overpriced, underpowered and completely outclassed by the competition.
Zoom G2 Four and G2X Four review: an unwelcome journey to the past
Multi-effects pedals have come such a long way over the last 20 years. Anyone want to tell Zoom that?
I dont know what happened. At least tone-wise they were heading in the right direction. I liked my G3x especially after the last firmware that allowed you to scroll. They have gone down the proverbial crapper across the board IMO.
Sascha Franck
Rock Star
- Messages
- 6,157
Multi-effects pedals have come such a long way over the last 20 years. Anyone want to tell Zoom that?
(...)
Combining obsolete hardware, awful sounds and baffling limitations, Zoom’s latest multi-effects pedals are overpriced, underpowered and completely outclassed by the competition.
Zoom G2 Four and G2X Four review: an unwelcome journey to the past
Multi-effects pedals have come such a long way over the last 20 years. Anyone want to tell Zoom that?
Muahaha, great review. Digging this:
On a more serious note: Absolutely weird to see the company going that way. IMO it started with the G5 series when they didn't exactly improve anymore but came up with weird new layouts, all that pseudo-carbon nonense and what not.
I mean, the G3 is still serving as my acoustic pedal and you'll likely have to pry one of the two MS-50Gs I own from my cold, dead hands (pretty much all amps and drives suck as much as it gets but some FX are extremely decent and I have yet to find better onboard editing on a device of that size) - so what happened? Major internal changes?