hippietim
Axe-Master
I was planning on doing a side by side comparison with my Drop pedal, but my bass player has it. So a demo will have to wait. I had done a demo of the III vs. the Drop a while ago and the III was very close at the time. I'm pretty sure the III will come out the clear winner this round.
Last night I got a chance to try out the pitch block improvements. It is quite an improvement.
Drop tuning:
In my experimentation last night, I found that setting tracking on the III to around 6 instead of the default of 5 made a noticeable improvement when I was down a whole step. I could play things like an Eb major in the 6th position in the neck pickup and there were barely any artifacts. Dropping down to B, the warble was present with chords like that Eb but in a mix you'd never know. Increasing tracking to 10 cleaned it up but added more latency than I was happy with. If you have to drop down to B, I would keep the tracking setting at 5-6 and add adjust the tone/effects to give it a little more edge or maybe some subtle effects (modulation/delay/verb). Going down an octave was still totally usable.
Capo:
Using it as a capo, the III sounded way better than anything I can recall. Somehow, that often off-putting metallic sound is all but gone. I tried 2, 4, 5 half steps and it was really impressive. Then I did an octave up and brought the mix down and brought the highs down with high pass filter. The results were darn good. In a live setting you'd have a usable 12-string - it really is nice.
Harmonizer:
Tracking an octave and diatonic 3rds was no problem even with chords - arpeggiating chords and letting things ring worked way better than I expected. Then I added the 7th. Individual note tracking was excellent. Even most double stops were good. Chording and such got a little sketchy at this point - the 7 really makes things tough but the reality is it still sounded better than anything I could recall.
That's all I got to last night with the III.
I did try some similar things with the HX Stomp real quick. The HX is usable but has way more warble at more moderate settings. No contest here really for the pitch block.
Last night I got a chance to try out the pitch block improvements. It is quite an improvement.
Drop tuning:
In my experimentation last night, I found that setting tracking on the III to around 6 instead of the default of 5 made a noticeable improvement when I was down a whole step. I could play things like an Eb major in the 6th position in the neck pickup and there were barely any artifacts. Dropping down to B, the warble was present with chords like that Eb but in a mix you'd never know. Increasing tracking to 10 cleaned it up but added more latency than I was happy with. If you have to drop down to B, I would keep the tracking setting at 5-6 and add adjust the tone/effects to give it a little more edge or maybe some subtle effects (modulation/delay/verb). Going down an octave was still totally usable.
Capo:
Using it as a capo, the III sounded way better than anything I can recall. Somehow, that often off-putting metallic sound is all but gone. I tried 2, 4, 5 half steps and it was really impressive. Then I did an octave up and brought the mix down and brought the highs down with high pass filter. The results were darn good. In a live setting you'd have a usable 12-string - it really is nice.
Harmonizer:
Tracking an octave and diatonic 3rds was no problem even with chords - arpeggiating chords and letting things ring worked way better than I expected. Then I added the 7th. Individual note tracking was excellent. Even most double stops were good. Chording and such got a little sketchy at this point - the 7 really makes things tough but the reality is it still sounded better than anything I could recall.
That's all I got to last night with the III.
I did try some similar things with the HX Stomp real quick. The HX is usable but has way more warble at more moderate settings. No contest here really for the pitch block.