Synth pedal

[patrikmarky]

Looking for recommendations on a good synth pedal ..nothing to complicated or expensive..I have a digitech synth/wah at the moment.

[paul_5]

I always liked the synth sounds on the zoom ms60b - they can be had for reasonable money these days.

[LukeFRC]

C4 and future impact are the top of the line. 
 

there are some others that @Al Krowwill be around to recommend 

[lidl e]

On 08/02/2024 at 15:17, patrikmarky said:

Looking for recommendations on a good synth pedal ..nothing to complicated or expensive..I have a digitech synth/wah at the moment.

If you dont want expensive or complicated, the digitech you have is hard to beat. Its an excellent pedal for the price.

 

Ibanez SB7 is similar and also excellent.. sub 150 you wont find better than those two i think.

[pete.young]

If you want something that will produce some useable '80s sounds and won't have any issues with tracking you could look at the Boss SY-1. It's a synth emulator not a synth, but I found it much easier to get useable sounds out of than almost anything else I've tried.

 

As a synth pedal, the BSW is a great octaver.

[StingRayBoy42]

Depends what you want to do with it...

I use an SA C4 for covers stuff - there's a database of patches that people have made to emulate various sounds, so if you want Stevie Wonder's Phat Moog Bass on Living for the City, or the Bass sound from Toxic or the squelchy intro to Radio Gaga or whatever, someone's almost certainly made one (in some cases three or four) so you can just download it, and you've got that sound in your C4. No fuss, no muss.
There's hundreds if not thousands of sounds available for it, some go into great detail about what they are and what they sound like, some are called things like "Bass Synth sound #40867"

If you do like a bit of knob twiddling, there's a fully programmable/utterly incomprehensible back end  for your tablet/phone/laptop where you can build your own sounds and twiddle with all sorts of knobs, oscilators, square waves, octaves, filters and all sorts to your hearts content.
Way beyond me, I much prefer the "find a sound for the song I want and download it with two clicks" option.

It is pretty expensive (About £150-180 ish second hand?) but it will hold its value and someone on here will almost certainly give you what you paid for it if you want rid of it.

Also, if you want instant access to more than six sounds, you'll need a controller - I use a DMC micro that was another £90 or so.


The Boss SY-1 is another fantastic pedal. - 120-odd sounds that you can fiddle with using the (fairly?) intuitive controls. Some are more useable than others IMHO. The sequencer ones are amazing - play a note and it's instant 90s dance music.
About £110 second hand?

The Boss SYB-3 is a bit older (possibly cheaper?) and a bit more limited but to be fair, I used to get some lovely Phat/evil sounds from it.
The SYB-5 is the later version... never used one but I'm sure it's as good as the SYB-3.

The only drawback with the Boss ones I mentioned are that there's no option to recall sounds, so if you find a sound you like, you'll have to take a photo of where all the controls are!
Also, it's impossible to flip between different sounds mid-song, unless you put a 128 bar drum solo in while you get your phone out, scroll through your gallery to find the picture of the sound you want, kneel down and fiddle with the controls on a dark stage.

Boss do a couple of versions that do have recallable sounds - the SY-200 and SY-1000 if memory serves. 
I've never used them, but *if* they're basically an SY-1 with storable presets, I bet they're ace.

Hope that helps!

[Quatschmacher]

Future Impact and C4. Yes there’s a bit of a learning curve to adapt your playing to the pedal’s monophonic pitch detection but honestly, there’s nothing really out there that comes close.

 

Both around £180-200 used. 

 

plenty of FI and C4 clips on my soundcloud page:

https://on.soundcloud.com/ogy92kYkKVPDhq7v5
 

https://on.soundcloud.com/oGRfSqdPcTi9LFrh7

Edited February 14 by Quatschmacher

[pete.young]

5 hours ago, StingRayBoy42 said:

Boss do a couple of versions that do have recallable sounds - the SY-200 and SY-1000 if memory serves. 
I've never used them, but *if* they're basically an SY-1 with storable presets, I bet they're ace.
 

The SY-200 is. The SY-1000 is a whole different ball game - to get the best out of it you really need a Roland GK3 pickup and it's a lot more expensive, but you can do a hell of a lot of stuff with it.

[Owen]

I would like to speak up for the Korg G5. Old? Yes. Big? Yes. Really easy to programme and sounding good? Yes. Triggering issues? No. I think it is a bunch of filters messing with your provided note. Available for circa £120. I would have mine on my pedal board if it was a bit smaller. 9 memory slots which is nor humoungous. But actually, enough. 

[0175westwood29]

Love my Sy200……so much I have two

[uk_lefty]

On 13/02/2024 at 17:00, pete.young said:

If you want something that will produce some useable '80s sounds and won't have any issues with tracking you could look at the Boss SY-1. It's a synth emulator not a synth, but I found it much easier to get useable sounds out of than almost anything else I've tried.

 

As a synth pedal, the BSW is a great octaver.

The SY-1 is very good, it can actually track your playing. For a synth pedal that doesn't cost an arm and a leg that's not always possible! The EHX Bass mono synth has great sounds but is very limited in that you have to play very slowly and deliberately to get anything out of it, if only they'd upgrade it...

[Quatschmacher]

On 17/02/2024 at 18:21, uk_lefty said:

The SY-1 is very good, it can actually track your playing. For a synth pedal that doesn't cost an arm and a leg that's not always possible! The EHX Bass mono synth has great sounds but is very limited in that you have to play very slowly and deliberately to get anything out of it, if only they'd upgrade it...

The SY-1 isn’t tracking pitch. The boss “synth” pedals just process and overlay the incoming audio to make it sound a bit like a synth, which is why there are no triggering issues. Contrast with stuff like C4 and Future Impact which do track the incoming pitch and output a digitally-generated oscillator waveform.