Yamaha Guitar multi-effects

Purchased from Ebay used for $225. Bought to provide recording & stage processing for guitar. I've tried a whole string of preamp and guitar efx processors over the past year. New units from Line6, Korg, Zoom, Digitech, and the Yamaha DG Stomp came out on top of the heap. What I was looking for was a real tube-sounding efx unit that I could use much like an analog efx unit, and manually tweak the efx and controls in real time. I dumped all of them except for the DG Stomp. It has the most realistic and usuable tones and efx out of the bunch, including the Pod. Easy to use in real-time mode, you can turn on/off the modulation efx (flange, phase, rotary speaker), echo/delay, and reverbs, and program the foot switches for that purpose. The rotary knob allows you to select a wide variety of tube preamp tones, from very clean and spacious to outrageous metal gain. Those settings are also completely adjustable with the range of volume and tone controls on the preamp side. It also has a speaker simulator with a lot of speaker settings, but I tend to leave it on 1 setting for most everything. The overal sounds that come out of this box are real sounding, and not overly processed. If I had to, I could get away with just using the DG Stomp for recording sessions with nothing else. However, I do use an old DBX119 compressor/expander to eliminate the noise that comes from the DG Stomp (there is no noise gate), and I also use a Line6 DM4 Distortion Modeler footpedal to set up 3 preset levels of gain as well for convenience. The Stomp is built like a tank, and I've kept it and plan on keeping it where all the other units I tested I got rid of a few days later. The Stomp is a keeper. No noise gate or noise reduction built-in but as mentioned I use an old DBX119 to get rid of the noise and unlike a noise gate it doesn't shut off the tail of a signal. I would expect that a Hush unit would work petty good as well. There is a website that discusses how to modify the Stomp to get rid of the internal noise floor (mostly present when the high-gain preamp settings are selected), and this involves removing all of the PCB board screws and isolating the grounding of the board but I haven't tried this method. Super heavy duty, you could throw it off a roof and it would probably be ok. Great preamp and efx unit, both on headphones (use the spkr simulator) and into an amp (turn off the spkr simulator). Sparkling tones, realistic efx, I love it. This review was originally published on http://www.musicgearreview.com