Great Multi-FX / Preamp, hidden in plain sight: Boss ME80

[funkydoug]

HI folks,

been experimenting with a Boss ME80 as an all in one solution. In short: it’s great.

I wanted to find an all-in-one box to that could satisfy 90% of my situations (gigs, sessions, jams etc), which include bass and guitar duties but my primary focus is definitely bass. The ME80 does lots for guitarists - obviously - but on bass it ticks an awful lot of boxes too:

• the clean preamp is very transparent and can be pushed into tubey goodness with the gain dial. The other preamps aren't ideal for bass but the 'clean' setting gives a great tone and doesn't cut bass frequencies in a bad way (see below).
• the cab sim introduces an HPF at about 100hz and a LPF at about 4khz. The clean preamp can be set to be pretty much flat, and boosting the bass dial boosts nicely and quite widely around 125hz, which means it sounds great for a lot of bass tones, but maybe not for those wanting loads of very low frequency energy in their sound. I've done spectral analysis of it in my DAW and it looks like this (pretty flat between the HPF and LPF) when bass is at noon, mids at 1pm and treble at 10am (running white noise through it):

 

• without the cab sim there is much more very low & very high end; it becomes fully flat. The cab sim comes on when something is plugged in to the headphones and affects all outputs. As a result, in a live situation you could either run without cab sim (and therefore without the HPF / LPF shoulder in the chart above) or plug in some phones or a dummy jack to engage them if you want the HPF and LPF.
• The OD section can be used very nicely on bass. I like the blues setting as a drive / distortion that also is very flat in response. The boost option is also flat but just adds more gain to drive the amp sim. I've not played with other OD settings as they're either not my bag (the metal stuff) or cut bass (overdrive setting is a BOSS SD1, so it cuts a lot of bass, as does the TScreamer)
• There is a tuner, noise gate, and flexible expression pedal, aux in and phones out.
• The eq section (the optional extra one, that can also be used for effects) is a cut& boost eq that we are more familiar with. Nice to have both options, and for it to be stomp-able.
• The other obvious thing which I really like is that this feels a bit analogue, in that there are no menus or complications and it can be run in manual mode  -  what you see is what you get.
• The bottom left pedal section has a lot in it for bass - a passable OC2 clone, and a good, simple compressor. Unfortunately it is one or the other as they can't be used together. I can live with what though (I did say I wanted a one box solution for 90% of gigs, not 100%). 

I like it. It has a lovely clean tubey kind of sound and there is no noticeable latency at all. The amp sim has the mild baked-in compression effect that you'd find in most guitar amps. As a result, the huge dynamic spikes that a high-end, high-headroom bass preamp can throw at you are compressed a bit, but not in a bad way. For me that's a bonus. 

I think if you really wanted  to preserve a very large dynamic range then you'd have to switch off the preamp (in which case you probably don't want one of these anyway) or maybe just turn the preamp gain down, and if you really want a lot of sub100hz in your tone you'd be better off elsewhere. If however you can live with the 100hz hpf (and I know some of us are a little HPF obsessive these days!) this might be worth a look. Bombproof and easy to find used too.  

 

So far I'm loving it!

Doug

Edited April 13 by funkydoug