I had the G5 for several months on loan from a mate of mine, I practiced and gigged with it during that time. It is really well built compared to what I have come to expect of Zoom pedals, very solid indeed. It is a bit user unfriendly at first but once you read the manual a bit and wrap your head around how you can edit and arrange the effects its pretty good. What I like about it was the 3D expression pedal. The pedal also swings left and right in addition to swinging up and down the normal way. This gives you avenues to configure different effects which can be used simultaneously, which I quite liked ( you could for example control your wah with the up and down motion and control your flanger volume with the left to right motion and do cool things by stomping down and turning to the right simultaneously, just as an example). The second thing I like is that it has loads of different preset effects but shows you and allows you to edit all the "virtual pedals" and the modeled amps that are combined to give that effect. An example is one of my favourite presets which is called the Slow Attack or Distant attack, I cannot quite remember. Its a great effect for creating a soundscape. I managed to go into it and tweak the delay and reverb pedals (often copies of legendary boutique pedals) as well as the amps modelled within it in order to get just the effect I want it, and it sounded fantastic. Alternatively, you can choose to create your own preset by combining the pedals individually and choosing the amp you want and tweaking the gain, tone, and reverb on them for instance. A lot of the effects were pretty unusable in their unedited state which I put down to the fact that not all presets will work with all guitars and amps. I played my Cort Strat copy and a U.S. Tele (also borrowed from my generous friend) through a Marshall combo amp whose full name I do not quite recall. And at Home I plugged some studio grade headphones into the G5 to practice, which also worked pretty well. The G5 is noseless and the effects are not too far off from what you would get from the original pedals. Other nice touches were the direct USB compatibility and option for PC-based tone editing and setup etc (which I never tried for fear of returning a non-functioning G5 to my friend who had barely had the time to even try it out.) I was quite impressed with it after a while but at first it really intimidated me to be honest.Chocklit_Thunda wrote:How is the G3? I was looking at getting a G5 earlier this year. mainly for recording but also, it doesn't hurt to have 120 different effects available at any time ?Giggsy wrote: My board (and the purists retch ?)
Some don't like multi effects but I believe that they have their place. There's no one-size-fits-all solution though, thus my setup. The Zoom, Line 6 and Digitech each have things that they are great at doing, but they also all suck at other things.
If you cannot tell by now, I enjoy writing reviews of stuff. I am nowhere near the level of a professional writer or reviewer but, if there is a vacancy on the forum for an intermediate-player review of some gear..... ?... Alan...... anybody? I promise to return all the gear in perfect working order once I am done ?
