Is it a case of the pedal board two step risking falling on your back side just about when your face melting solo about to blow the crowd away.....or a pre programmed multi effects pedal to take away the stress!
However there are a number of ways of looking at this. With individual pedals you can select individual favorites and mix them on your board, with a multi effects unit you are stuck with the preset and its parameters! OK you have effects loops in some units, I'm sure some are good but everyone I've tried colours the tone of your looped effect! There are many high quality multi effects such as TC, Carl Martin and Trimode but is it a compromise?
Look at it another way, when you are playing in a band how much of what you recognize as the tone you want in fact hear cuts through to your audience........and more importantly do they notice! We've all listened to bands and thought that sounds good and had a look at the guitarist rig and thought Oh dear why's he using that crap!!! and the opposite. OK I'm playing devils advocate but maybe we get a bit carried away sometimes?
I talked to singers who say guitarist play them a riff and change the settings a few times and say which is better? Many say, yeah OK……..but they all sound the same to me!
So maybe what you are comfortable with and within a reasonably wide range of acceptance is they way to go. Multi or single I guess is personal preference. I use single but in two banks with a loop pedal wah with tuner, OD and Distortion on one side and OD, Distortion, Fuzz, delay and Phaser on the other. Allows me to play the wah on OD then switch loops to play Distortion only hitting one switch…..A quick re-set is required after that song, but that’s the compromise!
My problem is when I play a board set up one day the next time I play it other pedals I think others sound better…..my current either or is a TC Distortion or a modified RAT!!!.....well that’s my problem!
