After having spent some time with my $299 Tonex pedal, and being a long time FAS user, I have a few thoughts
The pedal looks cool with the glowing amber color coming out from the side “vents”/holes but the switches feel cheap, not relays and it could stand to have a better display to convey more information, likewise, could use more dedicated knobs.
Noise gate is crap, reverb is okay but basic, no huge ambient reverbs etc. Comp too isn’t anything to write home about. FAS blows this stuff away. I can’t see ever using any of it really.
Most factory settings, kind of crappy. Sounded like a bad modeler, like NI guitar rig….
But….. when you load in some “good” captures, it actually sounds darn good overall. Much easier to tweak the VIR cabs, though of course your more limited. Can certainly add any 3rd party IR too, but the interface is slick, much like Two Notes. Not exactly Axe3 level tweaking and blending but can quickly dial in what your looking for.
Clean sounds good, but most anything can do good cleans three days, nice edge of breakup too, dynamic to an extent, but you kind of need a edge of breakup capture I guess, not going to take a totally clean amp and crank it and have it sound or respond like you can with a model. Models are more flexible but if you have say 3 captures at different extremes you can cover the same ground, just different ways of going about it.
Best part of the unit for me is the really heavy tones, “will it chug?” YES. You can get some perfect mix ready sounds out of the thing just by downloading an amp plus cab capture, probably with something like a 808 in front. Just some brutal cranked high gain amp tones possible.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say better than FAS, but would say easier as some of them are turn key, Axe takes more tweaking but can get there if you find the right IR etc.
Axe has better edge of breakup though for sure and as it has way, way better effects, overall tone can sound better and more polished, experimental etc.
For $399, or $299 in my case, I’m pretty impressed. Don’t think of it as a full rig in a box, you’ll want external pedals still for sure. It’s an amp/cab box with a few effects but can’t really say I’d use any of them.
It basically delivers on what the KPA did for like 1/7th the price.
You can capture a specific studio tone and take it with you in a little box and it sounds really really similar. Again could tweak the Axe to do the same thing but you’d be trying different amp models and lots of IR’s etc. Maybe if M flies out and helps you’d nail it, lol, but the ToneX makes it pretty easy.
Run Tonex in the loop so you have some high quality FAS effects and you’ve basically got the best modeling and capture/profiling options all together.
They are not competition in my opinion, do different things and both do their respective jobs very very well.
I’m not messing around with clean captures, Band Commander model is so so good. But, for high gain stuff, I probably am getting away from the 5150, Engl, VH4 and similar models and just using a capture. It’s easier and it sounds as good if not better to my ears.
All and all, man…. It’s amazing how good we have it these days. Even stuff like the fm3 are priced to give amazing tones to most peoples budgets who can’t drop over $2k on a III and now we are seeing stuff like the Tonex at $399 or less.
So check it out, it’s pretty cool, it doesn’t need to replace anything else, but awesome bang for the buck to patch into the loop and blow the FM3 wide open with some new tones
Saw the term "Fractal Camp survivors" and immediately thought of some training program or course. Ha, ha!
