So the story goes I’ve been looking for a multi effects and switching solution for my Revv G20 amp.
Ive been through a Helix, HX effects and Boss GT1000. I’ve tried to make all of them work for me with varying degrees of success.
All of them noticeably altered the sound of the amp to the point It really bugged me. Which I’m guessing has something to do with the analogue to digital converters.
The GT1000 was the worst of the bunch. Plus it was a massive PITA to programme. I felt like I was fighting all of the units somewhat and wasn’t entirely happy with the sound of any of them.
The way I was running all of the units was for effects only and switching the amp channels via midi. I was running the amp in a loop on the units and using the internal Two Notes cabs on the amp for IR’s running direct to my studio monitors.
I was an early user of the TC Nova system when they first came out, I always liked the sound of the effects and the compact size. I’ve actually owned a few units at various times over the years.
So I decided I would give one a shot again. I found one on eBay that had a intermittent fault with the drive section. I had no intention of using the drive section so I made a cheeky offer. Seller had it up for £75 I offered £65 and he accepted.
Got it all wired in, turned it on and it was a breath of fresh air. The effects are pristine and sound so good. Really easy for me to program and it also switches the amp via midi. It just sounds so much better than any of the other units.
Comments
I thought it sounded good, but it was a shit to program and it glitched out on me a few times (for example getting stuck in tuner mode at a gig) so I got rid of it.
Did have one button flip out on me once mid gig but went away after a reboot. Didn’t scare me too much.
I'm not hearing anything degrading the signal running the standard Nova with my setup. That might be down to the way I'm running it which is after the amp and speaker via the direct out on the Revv G20, like you would add effects in a studio.
I imagine it would work very well for acoustic as the effects are very clean and pristine.
have a hx fx on my second board and can’t say I’ve noticed any effect on the amp whatsoever.
I tried it as I wanted to have an FX only unit to use with my amps in place of my conventional pedal board. I liked that it had an internal psu whereby all you needed was a conventional amp 'kettle' type lead. However, I didn't get on with its interface as it was awkward to program and the display was very small. And even with the additional footswitch, I found the floor control to be awkward.
At that time I'd also acquired a Vox Tonelab LE and I A/B'd both units side by side purely using fx and not amp models. I found the TLLE to be much simpler to use with a better display, way better overdrive and distortion options, better floor control and aside from a couple of nice delays in the Nova, the TLLE fx were easily as good with several better, so I decided to return the Nova only because it didn't really give me anything significantly different to the TLLE fx wise, plus of course it also had the amp modelling.
However, if I didn't already have the TLLE I might well have kept it, even though I really didn't like it's overdrive tones.