NPD: TC Electronic Plethora X5 - from an HX FX owners perspective

TheBigDipper · November 2021

I have some frustrations with my HX FX. I admire it. It’s incredibly efficient. I don’t love the sounds I get out of it - they’re fine but not awesome - and I don’t sit down and “twiddle knobs” to find new sounds like I used to do with physical pedals. So I bought a Plethora X5 to see if that would be better for me.

After a week of ownership, I think it’s great, but it’s different. I wrote this to help me structure my own thoughts and start thinking about workflow - but some might find it interesting. Sorry for the length. :-)

What is the Plethora X5?

Essentially, it’s a multi FX product - a container for up to 5 TC Electronic TonePrint digital effects. If TC doesn’t already make it, it’s not in there. TC doesn’t make a digital drive pedal, they’re all analogue, so there are no drive effects in it at all. It’s a range of modulation effects, delay and reverb. There’s also a Looper, which probably uses the code from the original TC Ditto, as the functionality seems similar. There’s an effects loop to add physical pedals. You decide where the loop sits in your signal chain.

You can connect an expression pedal. There’s a small selection of IR-based cabinet emulations for people looking to go ampless or for recording.

The 5 footswitches support TC’s “Mash” technology. That means you can variably alter the sound of an effect by applying/changing pressure on its footswitch.

The X5 isn’t intended to be the central control point for your gear. It doesn’t send MIDI commands out (but can pass them through) and it won’t change channels on your amp. There isn’t the equivalent of Line 6 Preset mode. That is achieved via MIDI.

It’s only filled with TC pedals, but…

If you load a Hall Of Fame 2 Reverb into it, you’re getting the same algorithms and code as the real HOF2 pedal. That also means you can use TonePrints to alter the characteristics of your pedal. If you’ve never usedTonePrints, that’s rather more power than you might imagine.

The X5 can store 127 different presets. TC calls them “boards”. Each board contains 5 slots for effects. You decide what effects pedal you’d like to drop into a slot and what TonePrint you’d like to use as a starting point. Each pedal can have 75 different TonePrints stored on the X5. It’s enough.

Play and Edit

The X5 has two modes - Play and Edit. You go from one to the other by toggling a switch. “Up” is Play, “Down” is Edit.

Play Mode

In Play, you select a board, using the “Next/Prev” toggle switch, see the pedals and toggle them on/off with the foot switches. It’s like Stomp mode with Line 6. The expression pedal will control whatever you set it up to do on a board-by-board basis. By default it’s a volume pedal for the board itself and you decide where it sits in your chain.

There is also a feature called “Hotknobz” which allows you to change settings on the fly as you’re playing using the 3 control knobs - just like twiddling knobs on a real pedal. I’ll come back to that later. It’s very customisable and rather clever.

Sounds?

To my ears, the pedals sound better than similar effects on the HX FX. But that’s a personal thing. I’ve always liked TC mod/delay/reverb sounds. I’m pleased they sound just the same on the X5 as I remember from the individual pedals I used to own.

Edit Mode

Want to change something? Just flip the switch to Edit, and you are now editing the board you’ve been playing. Finished? Just flip back to Play. Any changes you made are saved there and then.

Creating a new board on the X5 is straightforward and you hear what you’re doing as you go. You use the rotary control to select a board, select a slot, select a pedal, and finally select a TonePrint. TonePrints are where the magic happens. On a real TC pedal, you’d use a knob to select a TonePrint (Plate, Spring, Hall, etc.) and then adjust the knobs on the pedal marked Delay, Tone, FX Level. The same happens on the X5.

As @allen said in his thread, it isn’t quite the same as Line 6-style loading of a “favorite” into a preset with all its settings, but it’s totally consistent with the way I remember TC pedals working and I soon got used to it again. You just load, listen, adjust the knobs and you’re done in 5 secs.

Then go back to Play mode. In Play mode, the values you selected in Edit are stored with that instance of that pedal, in that slot, on that board. Unless you’re using Hotknobz, the control knobs will do nothing in Play mode. In Line 6 terms, that’s the preset when you’re in Preset mode.

TheBigDipper · November 2021

Part Two:

TonePrints & TonePrint Editor

Template TonePrints for TC pedals are on the TC website. Templates can be downloaded to a computer or device (Win, MacOS, iOS or Android) and edited using the free TonePrint Editor software that TC provides. Connection to the X5 is via USB (all) or Bluetooth (iOS/Android only). You create your own TonePrints by starting with a TC template and then saving it. Or duplicate and edit one of your own that you made earlier. You can choose to save it on your computer/device or straight onto the X5 or both.

I think the editor is easy enough to drive if you want to create your own TonePrints. For me, the number of pre-defined ones available online are more than enough to get started. I’m using the TonePrint Editor to just select and audition TonePrints before loading them onto the X5 and tweaking things with the knobs.

TC also provides a library of “artist-developed” TonePrints that you can use, cannot edit in the editor but can tweak using the control knobs once they’re loaded onto the X5.

Hotknobz

Without Hotknobz, you cannot change anything on the fly if you're in Play mode. You'd need to pop back into Edit mode, make a quick change and back to Play mode again. That's not too onerous, but it would update your board.

If you define one of the control knobs as a Hotknob, then you can assign it to control any TonePrint parameters for one or more of the pedals on that board. For example, maybe change the FX level for your delay and vibe from a single knob. That’s a lot of dynamic control of your sound when playing - twiddle a Hotknob, use an expression pedal, press on a Mash-enabled footswitch, use the pedal footswitch to set tap tempo for that effect (or multiple effects). I’ve only just started with that, controlling simple things, but I like it already.

Hotknobz are set up on a board-by-board basis. That, combined with certain ways of setting up TonePrints, can give Line 6 Snapshot-style functionality. I haven’t tried that out yet, but the scope and potential seems huge.

MIDI

The X5 can be controlled using MIDI.

Boards can be directly selected by board number using PC commands, or you can page up and down with CC commands.
Pedals can be turned on or off (which is mainly how I use Snapshots on the HX FX) with CC comands.
The looper can be turned into a 4-button looper (record/overdub, play, clear, pause) using CC commands.
The three Hotknobz can be adjusted using CC commands.

In Summary

Made it this far? You’ve got stamina!

It’s very early days, but I’m enjoying using the X5 to experiment with sounds - far more than I ever do/did with the HX FX. It’s a much better bet for the home player, and as I’m between bands at the moment, pretty useful for me right now. I prefer the sounds I’m getting. They’re more musical and 3D than what I’m able to dial in with the HX FX. I often find an effect on the HX FX gives me a sound which I then need to run into something else, a hi cut filter, say, to make the overall sound more pleasing. The pedals on the X5 don’t seem to need that to sound good.

On the other hand, the HX FX met all my needs as single MFX box to feed an amp when playing with the band. I just never learned to love it. It’s exceptionally flexible but harder (for me) to set up. Once set up, it works flawlessly. The X5 doesn’t have any drives, but I’ve started using a RevivalDRIVE with the HX FX to get nicer drive sounds, so…

My gut feel is already telling me to switch and get a MIDI controller to drive the X5, the RevivalDRIVE and my AMP1. Or is it just boredom and GAS? Who knows?

JCA2550 · November 2021

Great review and you also provided a considerably better user guide here than the bumf that comes with the Plethora X5.

Wazmeister · November 2021

Hey mate, thats a brilliant review and thanks for taking the time out to write it.

I think if they added the Ditto, it would be really more appealing.

Gassage · November 2021

Wazmeister said:

Hey mate, thats a brilliant review and thanks for taking the time out to write it.

I think if they added the Ditto, it would be really more appealing.

Ditto.

digitalscream · November 2021

I loved the idea of the Plethora X5, but then I realised that it's TC Electronic, so there must be something critical that's missing.

Sure enough...no MIDI OUT, so you can't use it as a controller for your rig (eg switching amp channels etc, even with an external MIDI relay controller) unless you get a MIDI controller for it, which sort of negates the point of it taking up that much space on your board.

I brought it up with TC and their response was, "You're not supposed to want to use it for that". Brilliant.

allen · November 2021

Very well written review.

I've been playing it for a few weeks now and much prefer it to my HXFX.

I think you're right in saying that the plethora suits the home player a lot more - smaller form factor and simpler editing. The HX is much better for choice of effects, better for complex switching, etc. but the plethora is more immediate and feels a lot more like a pedal (with a lot of effects) with knobs rather than a whole system.

I would have thought that it can be run in a gigging situation, but probably has a tiny bit too many restrictions for a lot of people.

I need to do a video to run through these issues side by side.

I'm also very happily running it on a battery power supply so it's a very self-contained experience with my amp.

I just got a two notes cabm, which I can also run on the same battery supply and now have a pretty powerful headphone experience for my valve amps.

TheBigDipper · November 2021

Gassage said:

Wazmeister said:

Hey mate, thats a brilliant review and thanks for taking the time out to write it.

I think if they added the Ditto, it would be really more appealing.

Ditto.

I've got a Ditto+, so I've not yet tried the onboard looper. It was added to the X5 in a firmware update, so the initial reviews and videos at product launch time don't mention it. I'm not sure why you would, but you can have several instances of the looper loaded at the same time and control them all using MIDI. So you can start them all in sync and choose which ones to overdub to and pause/restart, I guess. a 5 channel looper? Is that a thing? Where's Ed Sheeran when you need him?

TheBigDipper · November 2021

digitalscream said:

I loved the idea of the Plethora X5, but then I realised that it's TC Electronic, so there must be something critical that's missing.

Sure enough...no MIDI OUT, so you can't use it as a controller for your rig (eg switching amp channels etc, even with an external MIDI relay controller) unless you get a MIDI controller for it, which sort of negates the point of it taking up that much space on your board.

I brought it up with TC and their response was, "You're not supposed to want to use it for that". Brilliant.

It's just not for you then, is it? We're all unique in what we want from stuff.

I guess it's TC's responsibility to decide what it can deliver, who might be their customer base, what the strongest use cases are and position the product accordingly. It's fairly clear they've decided to work to their strengths and let people find their own solutions for things outside the product scope.

digitalscream · November 2021

TheBigDipper said:

digitalscream said:

I loved the idea of the Plethora X5, but then I realised that it's TC Electronic, so there must be something critical that's missing.

Sure enough...no MIDI OUT, so you can't use it as a controller for your rig (eg switching amp channels etc, even with an external MIDI relay controller) unless you get a MIDI controller for it, which sort of negates the point of it taking up that much space on your board.

I brought it up with TC and their response was, "You're not supposed to want to use it for that". Brilliant.

It's just not for you then, is it? We're all unique in what we want from stuff.

I guess it's TC's responsibility to decide what it can deliver, who might be their customer base, what the strongest use cases are and position the product accordingly. It's fairly clear they've decided to work to their strengths and let people find their own solutions for things outside the product scope.

No, that's not exactly what I meant. TC's recent products are all missing something very useful, and their response is always "That's not what it's for" whereas these are useful things that every other comparable product on the market has. Bypass on the X4, MIDI OUT on the X5, presets on the Toneprint pedals, tap tempo that doesn't need a custom cable on the delays etc etc. Even more frustrating is the fact that they can do these things, because their rack effects had all of this functionality 20 years ago.

So many people wanted the X5 when it was released precisely because it's compact and would be great on a smaller board to remove/replace the need for effects and amp switches, and most of them were put off by the lack of any kind of ability to use it as a controller for the rest of the rig. Even the Nova System did that, and I'm most definitely not unique in wanting that functionality.

In a world where even compact delay pedals have proper MIDI functionality, this is a massive oversight. Putting a MIDI THRU on there and not OUT is just customer-hostile IMO.

TheBigDipper · November 2021

digitalscream said:

TheBigDipper said:

digitalscream said:

I loved the idea of the Plethora X5, but then I realised that it's TC Electronic, so there must be something critical that's missing.

Sure enough...no MIDI OUT, so you can't use it as a controller for your rig (eg switching amp channels etc, even with an external MIDI relay controller) unless you get a MIDI controller for it, which sort of negates the point of it taking up that much space on your board.

I brought it up with TC and their response was, "You're not supposed to want to use it for that". Brilliant.

It's just not for you then, is it? We're all unique in what we want from stuff.

I guess it's TC's responsibility to decide what it can deliver, who might be their customer base, what the strongest use cases are and position the product accordingly. It's fairly clear they've decided to work to their strengths and let people find their own solutions for things outside the product scope.

No, that's not exactly what I meant. TC's recent products are all missing something very useful, and their response is always "That's not what it's for" whereas these are useful things that every other comparable product on the market has. Bypass on the X4, MIDI OUT on the X5, presets on the Toneprint pedals, tap tempo that doesn't need a custom cable on the delays etc etc. Even more frustrating is the fact that they can do these things, because their rack effects had all of this functionality 20 years ago.

So many people wanted the X5 when it was released precisely because it's compact and would be great on a smaller board to remove/replace the need for effects and amp switches, and most of them were put off by the lack of any kind of ability to use it as a controller for the rest of the rig. Even the Nova System did that, and I'm most definitely not unique in wanting that functionality.

In a world where even compact delay pedals have proper MIDI functionality, this is a massive oversight. Putting a MIDI THRU on there and not OUT is just customer-hostile IMO.

I do hear your frustration without actually agreeing with you. It's your opinion. I have mine. We're both allowed... :-)

Bungle1 · November 2021

Nice write up. I just got one and was completely unaware of Hotknobz.

WiresDreamDisasters · November 2021

digitalscream said:

TheBigDipper said:

digitalscream said:

I loved the idea of the Plethora X5, but then I realised that it's TC Electronic, so there must be something critical that's missing.

Sure enough...no MIDI OUT, so you can't use it as a controller for your rig (eg switching amp channels etc, even with an external MIDI relay controller) unless you get a MIDI controller for it, which sort of negates the point of it taking up that much space on your board.

I brought it up with TC and their response was, "You're not supposed to want to use it for that". Brilliant.

It's just not for you then, is it? We're all unique in what we want from stuff.

I guess it's TC's responsibility to decide what it can deliver, who might be their customer base, what the strongest use cases are and position the product accordingly. It's fairly clear they've decided to work to their strengths and let people find their own solutions for things outside the product scope.

No, that's not exactly what I meant. TC's recent products are all missing something very useful, and their response is always "That's not what it's for" whereas these are useful things that every other comparable product on the market has. Bypass on the X4, MIDI OUT on the X5, presets on the Toneprint pedals, tap tempo that doesn't need a custom cable on the delays etc etc. Even more frustrating is the fact that they can do these things, because their rack effects had all of this functionality 20 years ago.

So many people wanted the X5 when it was released precisely because it's compact and would be great on a smaller board to remove/replace the need for effects and amp switches, and most of them were put off by the lack of any kind of ability to use it as a controller for the rest of the rig. Even the Nova System did that, and I'm most definitely not unique in wanting that functionality.

In a world where even compact delay pedals have proper MIDI functionality, this is a massive oversight. Putting a MIDI THRU on there and not OUT is just customer-hostile IMO.

Yes, totally.

You don't have to need the thing to see the use case... I mean look at the thing...

Image: https://images.static-thomann.de/pics/bdb/486712/14878210_800.jpg

That is almost BORN to sit at the front of a pedalboard with a wah next to it, and some other pedals behind it (your favourite drives and things) and to control the entire rig from a simple 5 switch unit with effects built into it.

I think it's a crying shame that TC always limit their products in some way, which prevents them from being the best they can absolutely be - all it would take is a small skunkworks project between the devs; show it to the product owner... boom.

But no. Restrictive interpretation of what the product is leads it to be less useful for a huge chunk of the market.

WiresDreamDisasters · November 2021

I happen to agree with OP though - with the Helix effects I too always feel like I need to "do something" to them.... the delays don't cut through as well as a Boss or TC delay does.

thomasw88 · November 2021

The main issue for me with the plethora was that if you changed something in edit mode it automatically overwrote the preset. The tone print editor is faffy and not being able to do a deep dive easily is annoying. The sounds were decent but I found it unusable for gigging personally.

TheBigDipper · November 2021

thomasw88 said:

The main issue for me with the plethora was that if you changed something in edit mode it automatically overwrote the preset. The tone print editor is faffy and not being able to do a deep dive easily is annoying. The sounds were decent but I found it unusable for gigging personally.

I'm not convinced I'd be using it if I gigged in a Top 40 covers band, so I can appreciate your point. I'm focused on original music now, so don't feel quite the same way. I used the Editor a few years ago with the real pedals and didn't like it. The current version looks like a bit of a rewrite and is much better. I prefer it to Helix Edit. Deep dives are straightforward - but you're limited to what you can change on the X5 itself, whereas the HX FX lets you change anything if you've got the knowledge and memory to drive it.

TheBigDipper · November 2021

Just a quick update now I've had the thing for a few weeks.

Still happy, but a couple of things have reared their little heads that are worth bringing up.

1: FX Loop - there's a feature to permit the use of a physical FX Loop so you can use external pedals. It's a mono send and return which is moveable up and down the signal chain between effects on a board-by-board basis. Unlike the HX FX, it doesn't use up an effects slot. Also unlike the HX FX, there's not an option to set the send or return levels. So, for me, running a hot RevivalDRIVE in that loop, I needed something to bring the return level back to unity gain. So, I needed to add an attenuation pedal after it to bring the level down. Luckily for me, @timbuk02 had something he didn't use and was kind enough to send to me for the cost of the postage. It's in place and doing a fine job. Thanks again! Specifying send and return levels is on the development schedule, apparently, so one day...

2: Using the expression pedal as a volume pedal - If you have a board where you don't need to assign the expression pedal to control an effect parameter, you can use it as a volume pedal. You can even specify where in the signal chain it should be. It doesn't use up an effects slot. Great! Except it's not very useable. Expression pedals have a linear taper. Volume pedals generally do not, they're logarithmic. So, although the feature works, it's useless because it's hard to control and sounds unmusical. Not enough change in audible sound at the lower levels (heel down) and far too quick at the higher levels (toe down). The HX HX used a slot for the volume effect, but clearly they adjusted the linear taper of the pot inside the expression pedal to make it control the volume in a logarithmic way. The X5 doesn't. Boo!

Because I'm quite likely to want to control volume swells AND effects parameters, I'm just going to buy a VPJr (again) and get on with my life, but just in case it was important to anyone else... You can make a TonePrint for the Hyperdrive Compressor to do nothing but alter the volume in a logarithmic way if you want, but that just uses up an effects slot, so I'm not going to do that.

Schmo · November 2021

Gassage said:

Wazmeister said:

Hey mate, thats a brilliant review and thanks for taking the time out to write it.

I think if they added the Ditto, it would be really more appealing.

Ditto.

Ditto

paulnb57 · November 2021

I doubt I will ever use my Plethora to its full potential, but I really like its user friendliness, to my cloth ears it sounds great, small footprint and it looks cool..

kennedydream1980 · November 2021

I’ve just picked one up from Andertons in the Black Friday sale. It’s going to replace a TC Triple delay which I’ve been using as a makeshift multi effects (Chorus, Delay, Reverb). Looking forward to getting my hands on it.

springhead · November 2021

I’ve done a few covers gigs with mine and am playing another one tomorrow. I make a board per song and write the relevant number next to each song name on the set list. Some boards will do more than one song. That’s using it in its most basic form, no midi, expression or fx loop but does what I need. Saves space and cables and means I don’t have to bend down and tweak settings between songs like with physical pedals - eg different delay times, tremelo speed or whatever. Once I’ve got a few more gigs in with it I might get more creative with it.

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NPD: TC Electronic Plethora X5 - from an HX FX owners perspective

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