Anyone using a Boss OD-1X/DS-1X/DA-2? - Now with review!

mike_l

monquixote said:

mike_l said:

monquixote said:

It's just arrived!

Expect a review shortly. See the classifieds shortly

:P

I see my reputation preceedes me

Either that, or I'm a piss-taking bastard....

monquixote

Just tried it for five minutes.

It's really weird but in a good way.

More thoughts later.

ThePrettyDamned

monquixote;390164" said:

Just tried it for five minutes.

It's really weird but in a good way.

More thoughts later.

Ooo excited.

EricTheWeary

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monquixote

So I had a very short amount of time to play with it today and get some initial impressions. 

The first thing that I didn't expect is that it isn't the normal yellow Boss OD look. What cameras don't pick up is that it's a really smart looking pearlescent yellow. The mirror faced control plate and knobs however are a bit naff and impact on the readability. 

So on to the sounds. 

First impressions are... 

...It's an overdrive pedal and a relatively generic one at that. 

I didn't really expect anything else from Boss they aren't going to do anything weird with the core sound and they defined what we think of as a standard overdrive with the OD-1 and SD-1. This however is in itself a minor triumph. Unlike a lot of digital distortions I've tried as part of various multi fx it doesn't have any weird artifacts and I honestly think if people didn't know it was full of DSP chips they would think it was an analog drive pedal.

I note all the YT videos of the MDP pedals are full of comments about the "digital tone", but I think that's just people listening with their eyes.

On to the controls. 

Level: Not much to say other than it has about the output you would expect and isn't afflicted by having a trillion decibels of output like a lot of modern drives. 

Low: They've gone a bit bonkers with this control and given it a completely insane range. I expect the usable sweep is from about 10 to about 2. At 12 it's pretty flat without the bass cut of a TS type. You can get more of a typical mid forward OD sound by pulling it back to 10 o'clock. Any less than that and you get the "American Idiot" guitar down a telephone line which I suppose is fine as a special effect, but not a lot else. Push it up and it get's stupidly fat with more bass than you could possibly use.

High: This control is a bit of a star. With most ODs the tone control is something you use to match the sweet spot with your guitar with shrill and muddy on either side, but this seems to be doing something clever where even with the tone rolled right down it gets dark, but never muddy. I didn't get the chance to crank it to see what it did so I'll report on that tomorrow when I'll give it another blast. 

Drive: It goes from pretty tame (but not completely clean) to quite a bit of drive for an OD. It's actually quite hard to work out how much drive it actually has because it doesn't act like a normal overdrive.

What I've said thus far doesn't really do justice to what it's like to use this pedal it's really quite weird and slightly unnerving for someone who's spent years playing with overdrive pedals into valve amps because it doesn't react like you expect it to. 

Firstly it's unnervingly quiet even at full gain. I don't think it has a noise gate in it because every pedal I've had that did sounded a bit weird on the note decay. The dynamics and touch sensitivity go beyond what you'd expect. You can go from really clean to really dirty just with pick dynamics. These two things combined make me think it's got some kind of  reverse compander in it so it's expanding the dynamics into the gain stage and then compressing them again so the level doesn't jump excessively. It's very cool to be able to do so much just by altering your pick attack.

The main thing that just bakes my head is the lack of clashing harmonics. You can literally put it on full gain and play major 7th chords and it sounds fine. You almost have to adjust your playing to get the most out of it because the rules on what you can and can't play don't comply to the norm. They really did miss a trick calling this pedal the OD-1X it really should have been called the "Chord Distortion" or something because I think a lot of people would find it incredibly useful, but don't actually know what it does and think it's an enhanced reissue like the Wasa Craft range.

The effect of the multiprocessing is that you tend to think you are using a lot less gain than you really are. You only really notice when you hit a single note and it sustains for ever. 

People seem to claim the sound is actually changing with your playing, but I don't think it does. I suspect it's just applying an optimised EQ to each band separately so that as you move up the neck different amounts of your sound is going through each of the ten filters if that makes sense. The net effect seems to be that as you run up the neck the sound thickens up and doesn't sound too thin.

I can see why the DS-1X seems to be more popular (and goes for more on Ebay). I've never encountered anything that does the kind of big distorted Sus2 chords you get in a lot of modern alt rock quite so well, but you'd probably want a the heavier tone the DS-1X or DA-2 would offer you. Where it does excel is at the more rock end of indie. Something like the intro to Champagne Supernova or Supersonic where you have those big distorted arpeggios it just rings like a bell.

As it stands I don't know if it's going to be something that I'll keep certainly the base sound is good, but isn't the best I've ever heard from an OD, but it can do things nothing else can and I think the real win is that you can just whack the pedal on and leave it. You can get a massive range of tones just with dynamics and it will do rhythm and lead, power chords and open chords.

I'll update with more when I've had more of a chance to play.

ThePrettyDamned

It sounds like a really interesting pedal, and as you say, different from the norm.

EBay search saved

monquixote

A bit more of an update having given it a bit more of a play. 

I still really like it and I don't think it could be described as sounding "digital"

Some observations:

Drop D riffage sounds really tight, I'd be interested to know what it could do on bass.

It's great for the alternative type sus2 riffage and songs like Everlong sound brilliant. I've always found that type of sound really hard to get before. 

One thing it doesn't do however is big chunky strat neck pickup riffage (think Tom Morello) it's just too tight. It doesn't really preserve the character of the guitar as well as some drives and seems to prefer HBs.

I played all my current drives yesterday set to a similar sound and asked my wife to say which ones I should put on my board. There was a Badass OD, Liquid Sunshine, Euphoria, and the OD-1X. Her comment was "They all sound the same to me except the last one, it sounds clearer."  Which I thought was very interesting considering she didn't know what was what or why they were different.

It's actually really gainy. With the drive maxed and the bass and treble pushed I was having fun playing Metallica riffs. It's ultimately voiced to be a bit too nice for that kind of thing and I can see exactly why the DS-1X is the more popular pedal as MDP is so well suited to dropped down chuggage. 

The lack of weird modulation products when playing chords with drive means it's easy to be out of tune without noticing!

 

Finally and probably most importantly I've been using it quite a bit and every time it makes me rock out with a big grin which must be a good sign.

ThePrettyDamned

Sounds awesome!

Just when everyone was saying drive pedals are all derivative and based on something else...

You should try the ds-1x. Okay, it's... Probably not useful to you. But I could play a diminished 7th chord up high or down fairly low and it sounded really clear, with no odd harshness or overtones.

The @petethorn demo is quite representative of the sounds, too. It's a cool pedal and a great deal of fun. And doesn't sound "digital" like, for example, a line 6 or zoom g3 drive sound.

monquixote

I think the demos of the DS-1X sound awesome, but as you say not anything I would use with my band. 

I think if you wanted to get those "Colour and the Shape" sounds you couldn't do much better. 

I'm seriously pondering a GT-100 so if I do I'll have access to A-DIst which is similar although not as nice sounding to my ears.

ChrisMusic

Thanks for putting such a great pedal review here, along with the demo videos, it's looking like an interesting and different use of overdrive and distortion.  Wasn't there a discussion on here very recently about a lack of pedal innovation ?

This may well be close to my "holy grail" of these pedals, or at least one flavour of them.

This quest started in my "previous life" with a Roland GR100 unit and Roland guitar, and the hex fuzz that it gave access to.  Exactly like this, it would give very pure chord tones as almost all of the intermodulation products were eliminated from the sound.  It was just like playing a utopian overdriven guitar sample on a keyboard in clarity, but with the feel and expression of a real guitar.

I made a breakout box to drive six pedals from the 6 individual string signals available from inside the Roland.  It worked fantastically, if more than a little cumbersome.  That's as far as I got with the project.  But on returning to playing the guitar again, one major piece of unfinished business is to refine that idea, which actually went way beyond what I have just described.

It looks like Roland / Boss have introduced the same thing in a single pedal, wow, I just have to try this for myself.

I assume that it is digitally separating each string and applying distortion to each, much like a keyboard and my description above.  The algorithms have obviously moved on since the first generation A-Distortion pedal.

I expect it feels very different to play, so that is a great new sonic adventure to look forward to.  As you said, you can pile on the distortion, but it's so clear it doesn't feel like as much as is actually there.  I am genuinely excited by this.

Maybe it's grail quest over now ?

hugbot

Good review. That's pretty similar to how I felt about the AD2. While it was great for big, sus7 modern rock chords at times it felt almost too clean?

monquixote

I tried it for the first time at practice yesterday. 

It sounds awesome for lead stuff loads of sustain and cuts very well it also stacks really well with my other drives.

For anyone especially interested in this pedal it will probably hit the classifieds fairly soon as I'm getting a GT-100 in the next couple of days so I'll be trying the A-Dist algo on there as an alternative.

Alnico

monquixote said:

For anyone especially interested in this pedal it will probably hit the classifieds fairly soon as I'm getting a GT-100 in the next couple of days so I'll be trying the A-Dist algo on there as an alternative.

I had called dibs on this however i've just bought a Boss Fender Bassman pedal which is (To my ears) Freakin' awesome so am offcially releasing my dibs to whoever actually has spending money left !

I really hope the GT-100 works out for you monquixote. 

ThePrettyDamned

Don't sell it until you've tried the gt100! Just in case

I'm glad you like it though.

monquixote

Yeah it's why it's not on the classifieds at the moment. 

Once I know I'm happy with the GT-100 I'll have a pedal cull. If not the GT-100 will appear. 

meltedbuzzbox

From reading your review it basically sounds like a Nobels ODR

Have you played one of those?

monquixote

meltedbuzzbox said:

From reading your review it basically sounds like a Nobels ODR

Have you played one of those?

No but I'd be surprised if it was. I don't think any non digital pedal could do what it does. 

The Jaques Fuse Blower II is the only pedal I'm aware of that does anything remotely similar.

PolarityMan

Sounds like these guys would be great for those mastadon type riffs with loads of open high string ringing out and whotnot.

monquixote

PolarityMan said:

Sounds like these guys would be great for those mastadon type riffs with loads of open high string ringing out and whotnot.

Yeah I would expect it would be great for that kind of stuff.

fretmeister

I really tried to not listen to the demos in this thread, but now I have.

As usual @Petethorn has made me want to buy more shiny things!

However I'm banned from buying music related items this close to Christmas so I'll have to stick them on my Amazon wish list and hope for the best.

I really fancy trying the DS-1X.