I’m looking to pick up a budget-friendly pedal or multi-FX unit (around $100-150) to use with my Analog Four MkII. I’m mainly after phaser and flanger effects to add some extra movement and texture to my sounds.
I know the A4 has built-in chorus and reverb/delay, but I’d love an external unit to bring in a different character, especially for deep, swooshy phasers or rich, metallic flangers. Ideally, something with stereo I/O would be great.
Does anyone here have experience with pedals or multi-FX in this price range that work well with synths? I’m open to digital or analog, as long as it sounds good!
I’m interested in both used and new units, so if there are any great second-hand options worth checking out, I’m open to that too.
The Zoom MS-70CDR is pretty much unbeatable at its price point. There are better sounding units out there but you’d need to spend considerably more money. And it’s a cheap way to try out different effects.
+1 For the MS70 CDR. The new version is a bit more expensive while it doesn’t really add that much compared to v1, but it’s still pretty much a bargain.
A used Quadraverb is in a similar price range, has very nice sounding fx (with eq depending on which config you use - some of the configs offer less fx, probably because they use more processing power) and midi cc control (no midi clock sync). It’s much more “bread and butter” while you can build crazy fx chains in the MS70 CDR.
I owned the MS70-CDR for a while, but I disliked the interface, and felt most of the algorithms underperformed. I spent more to get a good delay/reverb pedal (but no phaser or flanger).
If those two effects are what you want to concentrate on, you might do better with specialized pedals from Nux, Donner, or MXR (which you may be able to find second-hand). The Korg NTS-1 has these two effects, with the advantage that you can load third-party software on it if you don’t like the defaults. Sinevibes has two phasers and a flanger available for the platform. The NTS-1 is a bit flimsy and fiddly, but I kept it. Also, if you have an iPhone or iPad, there are some amazing iOS effects.
I’m also not the biggest fan of the interface. Personally, I’d be pretty happy with a Boss RV-6 and DD-8 combo. They sound pretty nice, are very simple to dial in and don’t cost a fortune.
I have an MS-70CDR+ that use for everything and i love it. The presets mostly suck and you need to tweak them a bit. But overall it gets the job done for such a small price.
