funkydoug

You can save a patch with the clean sound and then set the ctrl button to toggle various effects (such as your octave and drive) on/ off at the same time.

For me, the me90b brings closure to the pedal quest. I’ll keep it and will accept and learn to work around any compromises. I always thought I could imagine a better pedal board than the ones I had, whether that was separates or digital multis. Thats no longer true; I have a great respect for the work that is baked into this thing.

I really like them. They’re varied and can be punchy. The advanced drive is a really great, versatile dirt sound and is my favourite. I’ve often had the sense that what you’re describing comes from the clean blend, especially on a heavier drive pedals where the transient attack is more ‘distorted’ by definition. The me90b has a global blend which does that but it’s the same degree of clean blend for the whole unit.

Glad you’re enjoying it, I’d have felt a bit guilty if not 🤣

Yeah thats a fair comment. I'd also much prefer to be able to make changes like that on the unit itself but, its a minor grumble. Do it once and that's it. Bluetooth streaming - I like it, mainly because phones don't come with proper outputs these days and that's where my music is - but it could have been built in. Again, minor grumble. Once you've got the Bluetooth thingy though, it screws in place and is effectively bolted-on, if not built-in. I suspect that is a commercial decision on their part.

Yes. The final slot in each block can be changed to one of a pre-determined list of other effects. I put a chorus pedal on that block so that I can use the mod block for compression and the the compression block for octave, which is how I’ve set it up to use in manual mode. Writing that took me longer than actually doing it! Only caveat is that you need the Boss Bluetooth thingy to do it. But that is worth getting anyway so you can stream music from your phone or tablet to play along to, and I baked that into my buying decision.

Yes I think it comes with 9 banks of 4 presets which you call up / scroll through. You can add your own or download more if you connect to the web.

I know what you mean @eude. The 'fatigue' is not about being anti-digital; I welcome having the benefits of digital 'under the hood' but the benefits of analogue on the surface. Yes, that does come with compromise and constraints but I am happy to make that trade-off and I think Boss has made a really good set of choices with this one. It is a bit of a 'less is more' unit, and I'm onboard with that, but there really are so many great sounds in there that are easy to find and play with that it doesn't feel like much of a compromise for those of us who want to use it.

I own one and am very happy with the sounds. Boss has been using MDP as the ‘brand’ for its more advanced digital effects for a while and the MDP based adv-drive and M-comp are excellent. There are plenty of other options onboard too, of course. The AIRD preamps are also boss’s most up to date ones. I think you’d need to have golden ears to hear inadequacies, I can’t hear any. They will be slightly different to other flavours of amp modelling of course. no latency at all that I can hear, or feel. That is something of an obsession of mine so I am pleased to report that the unit feels very alive and interactive. The ‘env filter’ is a mutron clone and sounds great to me, as does the octave, which has the same 3 controls as an OC2. In summary, I like boss bass stuff. I loved my old Roland DBass amp and my old Bass cube. I love the LMB3. I love the newer MDP compressor pedal they have. So I was always going to be happy with the sounds of this thing. I’m of the view that line 6, and other units including those from boss, all have great sounds in them. I’ve learned the hard way that the interface really matters in terms of how you use it, enjoy it and get the sounds out of them. That’s why this is my forever pedal 🤣

I appreciate that these are concerns for you, but I won't use on a pedalboard, it is my pedalboard. I don't use patches, just manual mode. It works for me - hope you find something that works for you, there are certainly plenty of options to choose from!

I had an ME50b, and I'd say this is just as solid. Obviously it hasn't yet lasted 20 years, but I'd bet it will!

hi, I've had a pod go, used a full-fat helix, had a Boss GT Core, and looked closely at others like headrush. Had GT1b too. My main goal was to have something not too large and very immediate to work with. I don't use presets at all and wanted to get away from screens and overthinking / overplanning sounds. I much prefer to use this as a series of really good and flexible stompboxes. I find I feel more relaxed and the musical / creative parts of my brain can 'play' and my planning / thinking brain can stay at work! I'm also not worried about jumping from sound to sound. The closest thing I am aware of to this is Pedalboard mode on the GT1000. Might want to look it up. That might be the best of both worlds, but I don't want the option of both worlds!