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Listed at £419 on Fender's site
How does it compare with the Boss stuff?
I don't know about GigRig, but Boss put out one firmware update for the ES loopers. Ever. On a product that's been out what, nine years? So it's not as if Fender have stiff competition in the after sales department. (EDIT: @TheBigDipper
makes a perfectly valid point below- there isn't necessarily a whole lot of scope for updating a unit like this)
Don't talk politics and don't throw stones. Your royal highnesses.
As a mono guitar-playing ES-5 user with some MIDI pedal control needs and a user of Assigns, it probably isn't me. I love stereo effects when recording, but wouldn't dream of playing live in stereo at the sort of gigs I get. Even if I did, the sound engineers would just sum me to mono to make the mix in the venue the best it can be for everyone in the room.
They're not yet being clear about their support for MIDI, but does have have something. I'm more likely to chuck the ES-5 at some point for an MC-6 with an ML10 for the analogue switching. But I'm not looking just yet, because the ES-5 is reliable and doing what I need.
I'd like my ES-5 to have a better screen, and if I was buying new today, that would be a factor in my choice. But I don't actually suffer because of the one it already has, so it's no reason to change. I'm not concerned about the lack of firmware updates, either, because it already does what it's supposed to as far as I can tell. People don't buy Boss expecting frequent updates, do they? I'm not sure how much scope there is for adding functionality, anyway.
The built-in tuner is a good idea (as per the Plethora X5). The built-in volume pedal feature appears similar to the one found in the Plethora X5, and that had some issues (for me) with the volume curve they used when mapping the expression pedal to what the human ear likes to hear. It was a linear curve rather than logarithmic.
We'll have to watch a demo vid! :-)
That said, I've got an ES-5 too, and I can't see anything here (or anywhere...) to make me want to swap.
Don't talk politics and don't throw stones. Your royal highnesses.
The yard is nothing but a fence, the sun just hurts my eyes...
At first glance, MIDI support when loading new presets looks slightly better than the ES-5. On load, you can send one PC command to up to 16 different channels (so 16 different MDI pedals). You can also send up to 15 different CC commands (and they could all be to the same channel if you want).
No obvious sign of a feature like Boss Assigns, so - unless I missed it - no obvious way of sending a MIDI command at any other time.
A nice feature that I'd like to see on my ES-5 is "Favourites". It's a bit like "Stompbox" on GT1000 products. It's the ability to have a preset defined as a favourite (one of 100 available) and reference it in several places in your preset list, but only needing to change it once to see that reflected in every place you use it. So, if you have a preset for your clean sound, but use it 20 different songs, you just build it once and reference it in the slots you want to load it from. On the ES-5, whenever you change the makeup of that patch, you would need to copy it into every slot, one at a time.
Not sure that's necessarily how industrial design works. Could be that Ron Menelli drew up a design, then the Fender accountants went through it, changing everything they could to make it cheaper.
Likewise, "designed with" is not "designed by", and "designed with RJM Music" isn't necessarily the same as "designed with actual Ron Menelli".
I admit I'm being deeply cynical here, but I do wonder if it's just a way to add a bit of reflected boutique glow to the product.
Don't talk politics and don't throw stones. Your royal highnesses.
Fender's in charge of all sales, marketing, support and all that, so they'll have all the details on their site (soon, if not now). But, in short, this is an entry level switcher with a lower price point and smaller feature set than our switchers.
- It has 5 loops, the last one is stereo capable
- Input and output buffers, switchable
- Loops are reorderable, per preset
- One TRS function switch output
- One expression pedal input
- 400 presets, 100 banks of 4 presets
- MIDI output, sends PCs and CCs only
- Fixed button layout (with preset/bank and loop modes)
- No editor
It does have a couple of things our switchers do not: a color LCD, and a volume control. The latter is a volume control, which can be controlled by a connected expression pedal, that can be placed anywhere in the loop order.
Don't talk politics and don't throw stones. Your royal highnesses.