Zoom g3. Educate me!

timmysoft

How good are the pedal drives? In particular, is there models for rat and boss sd1 and how good are they? 

How do people find the zoom noise reduction?

Bidley

The drives range from rubbish to alright. I quite liked the Big Muff. You'll want to use your normal drive pedals. The noise reduction is great though, IMO.

bluechargeboy

Some of them are pretty good but they have way, WAY too much gain at the default setting. I have replicated the sound of my home-made TS808 very closely indeed. There are Rat and DS1 models IIRC. I haven't got the original pedals so dunno how close they are.

d8m

I found them all a bit 'meh' to be honest apart from the metal one.

The preset values need some dialling down though.

ICBM

I still haven't entirely been able to be happy with either the pedal models or the amps, despite a lot of fiddling. There's still something irritatingly artificial about them, even when dialing them in carefully to sound as close as possible to the real pedals - and as bluechargeboy says, they all have *far* too much gain at the stock settings. The amp models aren't even as good as the basic ones in Garageband either, which aren't brilliant themselves.

It's odd, because the B3 sounds fine from out of the box.

I like the G3 a lot for a lot of reasons, but the sound of the distortion modelling isn't one of them - or at least not yet.

thecolourbox

There's a boss overdrive on there but i think its an older one rather than the SD1, i quite liked that one, and the tubescreamer one. Ive only used the Rat, Muff and Fuzz Face (latter used in my fretboard challenge entry in fact), but to echo what the others say, they are too much gain unless you set them very carefully and selectively. I find if you use it with the amp models you need to set the amp gain pretty low and let the drives take care of it that way, otherwise i think it can sound a bit mushy-peas

timmysoft

Not intending on using it for amp models, just pedal style dirt, reverb and delays

Bidley

The 'verbs, delays, mods and the looper are worth your money alone, IMO.

Grumpyrocker

I think the drives are pretty good - but the default gain settings are way too high. You have to turn them down quite a bit before judging them. 

Branshen

I AB-ed the tubescreamer model next to a tubescreamer. And the mid hump sound was unmistakable. I've no qualms using it for jams or gigs.

fastboy

I'm going to flog my G3 if you're interested (it's the one without the expression pedal). Excellent condition, boxed with manual. 

monquixote

The dirt pedals are alright ish as are the verbs.

The mods and delays and looper are very good. 

The amp models are quite good, but don't react well to real OD pedals so you will have to use the simulated pedals if you want to boost them.

timmysoft

fastboy said:

I'm going to flog my G3 if you're interested (it's the one without the expression pedal). Excellent condition, boxed with manual. 

how much!.

fastboy

They all seem to sell round the £80 mark delivered on Ebay so if there's no fees involved on my side i.e paypal gift or bank transfer I'll get it delivered to you for £75 if that sound fair enough?

PM me if you want to go ahead. 

close2u

I quite like the 'Guvnor' effect choice for OD ... it works with my setup anyway.

I don't use mega OD.

 

mike_l

I found the factory settings were way over the top, and there was quite a volume difference between the patches.

Some are very good, some are crap. I liked the Van Halen one and the metal one best, but that's mostly what I'll play. 

I always found the drives/amp sims a bit uninspiring, or meh.

The mods and delays were good though.

 

EdGrip

The Muff is perfectly good, although it pales in comparison to my Musket (Muff type pedal). I also find the "Hot Box" (apparently based on the Matchless Hotbox) to be very useable, though, as everyone's said, you need to turn the gain down to almost nothing before it's useful. I'm not really fussed about this, as I enjoy having real distortion and fuzz pedals, so I'm always going to have them around to use with the G3 and whatever amp I've got.

chrispy108

I sold my SD1 because my Zoom did perfectly well at home levels.

Noise reduction is great, much better than with a normal pedal, because you can put the noise gate last in the chain, but triggered from the guitar input, so it reacts really quickly, but still cuts noise from pedals/amps.

DrBob

I use mine on a simplified pedal board. I still have a separate drive pedal 'du jour', TC Spark Boost, Dunlop CAE 404 Wah. Everything else comes from the G3..

Perhaps it lacks some of the nuance of nice individual pedals but out in the real world it works really well

DiscoStu

I scored a G3X on eBay last night!

I want it for modulation and the looper, mostly.

p90fool

The drives are ok, but are lifted into a different league if you put a virtual graphic EQ in the chain. Same goes for the amp models btw.

Usual rules apply as with all multi-FX, turn the overall volume up and everything else waaay down.