Alesis GuitarFX

Purchased from Musician's Friend for $69.00(US)
Replacement for aging DOD Acoustic1 multiFX board.

Visually attractive. Unfortunately, that's about the only nice thing I have to say about this unit. A piece of petrified dung encased in crystal is still a POS.

Where to begin?
First, the factory presets are substandard. Many of them just sound like a bunch of hissing snakes.
Although the advertising hype says all the settings are user editable. storing the user edits is impossible using the instructions provided in the owner's manual--which was probably written by Chinese slave labor with no real knowledge of English. I then attempted to use the procedures based on 8 years of owning a DOD multiFX unit. Those didn't work either. The customer service at Alesis has been unresponsive to questions about this issue.

The construction of the unit is sound, but as I observed above, encasing a piece of dung in crystal still makes the core content a POS.

Avoid this unit. Purchase something else.

This review was originally published on http://www.musicgearreview.com

This is a multi-effects pedal for Guitar, as the name implies. This isn't really able to connect to anything other than the guitar, as it only has the 1/4" input and output. There's no MIDI or USB inputs. It's not rackable. There is an option to connect a controller pedal that I haven't tried using.

UTILIZATION

Using this box isn't too difficult in theory, as there aren't a whole lot of controls. The two footswitches switch through the settings one at a time (left goes up, right goes down). The knobs are for switching through presets. They also switch from the editing mode to play mode, which is sometimes confusing. The pedal is a bit of a pain sometimes. Everything on the screen is really tiny to read, so I have a hard time identifying what sounds I'm editing. The manual is almost necessary for once, as the two-letter screen doesn't exactly give a whole lot of info about what sound is selected. This gets complex when trying to play on the spot, which I found almost impossible to do.

SOUND QUALITY

I think that this sounds about the same with any instrument. I guess I wasn't really blown away by any of the sounds on this preset. The amp-modeling sounds didn't really resemble the real thing in any way at all. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. The effects were average at best, and really lame at worst. Only about one usable delay, reverb, and filter effects out of all of them. Considering there's over 40 effects, this isn't a high ratio. I think that this is just another example of a pedal that's great for how cheap it is when practicing on your own, but it's downright embarrassing to listen outside to in a club or on record. There's no real selling point to this feature when it comes to sound.

OVERALL OPINION

I wanted to like this pedal, as I'd read a great review of it in a magazine. However, I'm convinced that they were just trying to sell it, and that it was really an advertisement in disguise. This pedal just isn't worth anyone's time, except maybe a young kid who doesn't know any better. For the price, it's not bad. But that's a pretty low price almost always. The sound quality is generally pretty bad, and doesn't really do anybody's sound justice. There are certainly better multi-effects processors out there for people who are willing to spend a little bit more.