I'm a tone god wannabe with no budget. I look for all the answers when it comes to getting the right guitar sound. I have tube amps. I have essential stompboxes. I have the most recommended guitars for my budget. And yet I have not been able to get the sound I want. Lately I have listened to the modelling amps that have been coming out on the market and I've been impressed. The top-of-the-line Peavey Vyper sounds great to my ears. I couldn't just go and replace my amps to pick this one up.
Weeks ago I went to our clubhouse and watched a local band, the Rock and Roll Relics perform. I'm a groupie. This talented band has a setup I wish we had in the Clubsiders. The guitarist Gail always sounds like the guitar players she mimicks. I've spoken to her before about her setup and she always has an older Vox Valvetronics with a Vox Multi-effects Pedal. That made me think that perhaps the answer is to get a modelling multi-effects pedal to mimick the guitar sounds. My first choice was the Vox Tonelab ST but then the question was, "how am I going to afford to get one?"
Fortunately my boss gave me a bonus. But after the money was allocated to various things like a trip to Boston late this spring and a new cellphone, I was left with too little money for the Vox. I then started looking around. I found the DigiTech RP90 and up until the day I was buying it I dreamed of having it. There were two big disadvantages to this pedal: no USB interface and no fuzz pedal emulation. They were two caveats that I thought I was going to compromise with. But that day I discovered that the DigiTech RP155 was the same price and instead of compromising those caveats I had to compromise with the expression pedal. Looking at the jacks on the pedal, an expression pedal input was included. That's it. I was sold. I bought the RP155.
Well, now that I have bought the RP155 I have had some time to play with it. The bottom line is that this is the best thing I ever spent $100 for. I can get the tone I was looking for and I didn't need to adjust the amp to do it. That's important given that the Fender Champion 600 has only a volume control. The RP155 has a decent equalizer and five preset tone settings along with the ability to adjust bass, midrange, and treble level and frequency. I suggest creating the sounds you want and listening to them through your amp as opposed to using the canned presets. If I had gotten the RP90 I wouldn't be so dog-gonned pleased with this. With the USB interface you can use the X-Edit software available from DigiTech. It is available for Windows or Mac. This software makes it very easy to create the sound presets you want. The methods used to create the sounds from the pedal are confusing and require some learning time. Not so with the software. Everything's there and the flexibility is amazing.
The equalizer and the noise gate are key. The Lexicon reverb settings are also great. My Vox AC30 has tremolo that I want to utilize when we play shows but I won't lug this anchor to practice. The tremolo works great on the RP155. The distortion effects sound very accurate to me as well as the different amp and cabinet settings. I have not tried to use this to work with GarageBand or any other recording tool. I am still learning how to take advantage of the twenty second looper. I think it should be a thirty second looper but I'm just learning how to use one so for me this is fine. I thought the two-pedal tap for the bypass would be an issue but both pedals could be tapped with one foot. The bypass sounds like a true-bypass but since I want to control tone I will most likely store rhythm/lead settings adjacent to each other. Fifty new settings can be stored which is more than enough because the fancier effects are less likely to be used. I do like playing with the Whammy effect and the delay effects sound really good.
This is really a partial review but I am quite impressed with this pedal. It feels like it can be abused but since it doesn't use real stompbox switches, I'd be careful. I am going to get an expression pedal soon. I will take this to practice and to gigs and will get comfortable with the looper before I re-review this pedal in the future. As for right now, I highly recommend this if you are not a purist with a keen ear for tone god perfection. That will cost you a lot more money.
