Monday Morning Roundup

I've been a bit pedal board obsessed lately, so this round up focuses almost exclusively on pedals.

Boss CS3 Compression Sustainer - $60

I'm starting to get interested in the idea of compression, and combined with my desire to have a buffer on my board*, this is a pretty reasonably priced two-birds-one-stone type of pedal. I'm currently running that Boss Metal Zone at the front of my chain to act as the buffer, and that seems silly.

Ibanez Mini AD-9 - $65

Despite attempts to move my mini-Marshall, there have been a bunch of tire-kickers and not any ready to pull the trigger. As a result, I'm thinking about picking up another mini-delay for the loop of the Marshall, as it sounded MUCH better with the delay there. (Delay in the front sounds terrible with this amp...)

This AD9 mini seems like the perfect low cost solution.  I could buy another Quick Draw through Amazon, but I'm interested to hear how this might be different.  Whichever I like better would end up on the board and the other would go in the loop of the Marshall.

I see no reason not to buy this, other than the price.  No, it isn't expensive, but why $65 and not $60? You're making the buyer not only go to the ATM, but also go somewhere to get change to make $65.

Inconsiderate, right? (Edit: I bought this one for $60)

Danelectro Cool Cat Overdrive - $80

See that picture of the Fulltone OCD?  Look again.  That isn't an OCD, it's a "CCD". The seller claims that the Cool Cat Overdrive was based on the OCD, so he took the guts out of the cool cat and put it in a custom OCD look-a-like box. I check out this video and to my ears it's pretty close.

So is this a good deal?  Well, its a cool idea, but given that there are other OCD-alike options out there (for less money), I think you'd have to be pretty taken with the custom enclosure to move on this.

An aside: I recently bought the Joyo Ultimate Drive, and I'm reminded of all the reasons I absolutely loved the Fulltone OCD.  I told myself that if I loved the Joyo, I'd pull the trigger on the new OCD. With the Joyo being only a week old, I'll wait a bit, but eventually I'll pick up the new OCD, which included a switchable buffer... cool.

Line 6 DL4 - $60

Wait, what?  Sixty bucks for this pedal is nuts, and of course I've already sent a message.  I don't have any experience with these, and while I get the sense that the industry has moved beyond this tech, $60 is still a ridiculous deal for this.

I really hope I get it.

Boss '63 Fender Reverb

This seemed like such an obvious idea when introduced that I wasn't sure why they hadn't thought of it sooner.  Take the famous 1963 Fender standalone reverb unit and put it in a Boss pedal.  Simple right?

These apparently sound great, though for me the jury is out on whether the quality of this "spring reverb" (it's digital) is so much better than the Hall of Fame's that it justifies loosing all the functionality of the later.

This unit seems to me to be the perfect non-effect - plug it into the loop and leave it on top of the amp.  With the Maz 8's reverb being much more subtle than the typical Fender reverb, this would be exactly the unit I'd try first in order to inject some more present spring verb.