Boss DD-500 - Modulation/reverb?

thomasw88

I used to have one of these, it was my favourite delay pedal.
Gas took me down the Fractal route.   Howeer, despite really liking the FX8 I couldn't get on with it in a live situation.  I've sold most of my old pedals (including my dd500) so looking to rebuild a more basic board now than what I had.

Just  bought  another DD500 on the bay.   I seem to remember you could get some type of chorus/trem/reverb out of the DD500.  What's peoples opinions of them?   Are they usable?

english_bob

Yes, you can get decent chorus/tremolo/reverb sounds from the DD-500.

I'm really impressed with it. Some of the presets are pretty good, and the Facebook user group (which is friendly and helpful, if a little P&W-heavy if that bothers you) has a collection of the various user presets that are circulating on the interwebs. They're also getting started on sharing presets via the new Editor that Boss have finally released. 

Flanging_Fred

I sold my trem pedal after I got the dd500. I also use it for flanger and chorus.  I even get a cool bitcrushed. Fuzz out of it - add in some hold and warp and it gets nuts.

im currently trying to wrangle some Gary Numan-esque synth pads out of it (not quite there yet though...)

BintyTwanger77

thomasw88 said:

I used to have one of these, it was my favourite delay pedal.
Gas took me down the Fractal route.   Howeer, despite really liking the FX8 I couldn't get on with it in a live situation.  I've sold most of my old pedals (including my dd500) so looking to rebuild a more basic board now than what I had.

Just  bought  another DD500 on the bay.   I seem to remember you could get some type of chorus/trem/reverb out of the DD500.  What's peoples opinions of them?   Are they usable?

Sorry to derail the thread a wee bit, but what were your reasons for not getting on with the FX8 live, and how long did you have it for?

thomasw88

Flanging_Fred said:

I sold my trem pedal after I got the dd500. I also use it for flanger and chorus.  I even get a cool bitcrushed. Fuzz out of it - add in some hold and warp and it gets nuts.

im currently trying to wrangle some Gary Numan-esque synth pads out of it (not quite there yet though...)

Would love to see the patches for chorus n flange if you could share them?

thomasw88

BintyTwanger77 said:

thomasw88 said:

I used to have one of these, it was my favourite delay pedal.
Gas took me down the Fractal route.   Howeer, despite really liking the FX8 I couldn't get on with it in a live situation.  I've sold most of my old pedals (including my dd500) so looking to rebuild a more basic board now than what I had.

Just  bought  another DD500 on the bay.   I seem to remember you could get some type of chorus/trem/reverb out of the DD500.  What's peoples opinions of them?   Are they usable?

Sorry to derail the thread a wee bit, but what were your reasons for not getting on with the FX8 live, and how long did you have it for?

Had it for three months.  Really liked it, in the house I could get it to sound awesome.   However whenever I played  it with my bands was never happy with the sound.  The drives aren't as good as pedals/ drive channels on my amps.  They're not bad, and absolutely miles better than any other multi effects  I've tried, but  I couldn't get them to sound as good as my old pedals or H&K statesman crunch sound. There is a massive difference in the drive patches  volume, and I did find that quite a lot of the drives started to sound very similar.   I tried loads of different approaches, using expression pedals to control the drive/volume/tone etc etc, parametric eq, compression different orders etc but it was too inconsistent;  I don't play in bands where people are happy for me to spend 10 minutes fiddling around with a preset in one of the practices we have, and at home I was spending ages trying to tweak things only to find in a band situation it wasn't working as I'd expected.

 Used it for a few gigs,  but wasn't really happy with the sound at any of them.  It was ok, but not as good as what I used to have.     I had planned to persevere but then saw a guy was looking for one and as they don't seem to be shifting overly quickly on here thought it was a chance to go back to pedals so just got the deal done tbh..   

I was really sad to see it go as it is an amazing piece of kit, but for me it wasn't as intuitive or as good sounding as my pedals/amps so I'll wait for another generation or two until going back into multi-effects.  I had a boss DD-500 before which was my favourite ever delay, so that was a no brainer,  but I hadn't really tried to use it for anything else - hence this thread!

monquixote

That's always been the killer with me and multi fx. In a vaugely professional band you can't stop rehearsal for 15 minutes while you tweak patches.

professorben

monquixote said:

That's always been the killer with me and multi fx. In a vaugely professional band you can't stop rehearsal for 15 minutes while you tweak patches.

I've never played pro but to me, while 15 mins is excessive, I'm sure a 'professional' band, even a vague one would be happy to sacrifice ten mins to sound better. 

It was it the common, guitarists dilemma, not an actually perceivable issue in tone? 

professorben

monquixote said:

That's always been the killer with me and multi fx. In a vaugely professional band you can't stop rehearsal for 15 minutes while you tweak patches.

This has always been my problem with MultiFx, I'm surprised one of the newer multi's doesn't have the option for 'global adjust' so tweaking the delay level affects all delays etc. 

just like a real board. 

thomasw88

professorben said:

monquixote said:

That's always been the killer with me and multi fx. In a vaugely professional band you can't stop rehearsal for 15 minutes while you tweak patches.

I've never played pro but to me, while 15 mins is excessive, I'm sure a 'professional' band, even a vague one would be happy to sacrifice ten mins to sound better. 

It was it the common, guitarists dilemma, not an actually perceivable issue in tone? 

na not really. most of the bands I play in we learn the songs before hand/set up sounds etc and have a good idea of what its going to sound like before we get together.

 Rehearsal is just to sort out the arrangement. If I'm not happy with my sound I will make a quick tweak. Lumping through various settings/different effects might be ok for 1 song, but not going to fly across the board.

The main difference to me was hearing the FX8 at home, thinking that sounds fecking awesome, taking it to a gig or rehearsal and going ugh Its not what I want at all... I never have that problem with pedals.

Beexter

professorben said:

This has always been my problem with MultiFx, I'm surprised one of the newer multi's doesn't have the option for 'global adjust' so tweaking the delay level affects all delays etc. 

just like a real board. 

The AX8 can do this. You can set a global mix level for pretty well any effect as well as global tap tempo. On the fly adjustments are as easy as real pedals too - if you have an effect active (or even if not) one press of the edit button brings up the "virtual" knobs which you just turn as if on a real pedal - job done, as quickly as in "real pedal" world.

Having said that, surely the idea of a delay pedal with presets, ie. DD500 is that you can have presets set to do different things - otherwise why not just get an individual, non-preset pedal?

thomasw88

Beexter said:

professorben said:

This has always been my problem with MultiFx, I'm surprised one of the newer multi's doesn't have the option for 'global adjust' so tweaking the delay level affects all delays etc. 

just like a real board. 

The AX8 can do this. You can set a global mix level for pretty well any effect as well as global tap tempo. On the fly adjustments are as easy as real pedals too - if you have an effect active (or even if not) one press of the edit button brings up the "virtual" knobs which you just turn as if on a real pedal - job done, as quickly as in "real pedal" world.

Having said that, surely the idea of a delay pedal with presets, ie. DD500 is that you can have presets set to do different things - otherwise why not just get an individual, non-preset pedal?

dude I'm aware of how all that worked. But Its not as easy as pedal board.

I always found with the DD-500 presets, that it worked very well for me - but that is just where I have a number of specific delay settings that I need.

For other people Axe Fx/Helix work so all well and good.

anyway can we get back on topic please!

english_bob

Flanging_Fred said:

I sold my trem pedal after I got the dd500. I also use it for flanger and chorus.  I even get a cool bitcrushed. Fuzz out of it - add in some hold and warp and it gets nuts.

im currently trying to wrangle some Gary Numan-esque synth pads out of it (not quite there yet though...)

Are you in the Facebook user group? Wouldn't mind getting a look at some of those presets.

I think where the DD-500 has the potential to really shine is in the CTL pedal functions and the assigns. In a very Boss way, they haven't implemented a particular gimmick that does one cool thing, they've given you a tool that can be used for a whole variety of cool effects *if* you can think of them, and given not so much as a hint in the manual what they might be.

Some of the factory presets have interesting things assigned to the CTL pedal (I found one a few days ago that used the "roll 1/4" setting as a sort of hold/sustain thing), but the potential goes way beyond that. 

I built a patch that used a double external footswitch to switch between three different tap tempo subdivisions and modulation settings. You could even set it up so that each one used a different type of delay- one analogue, one digital, one tape etc.