For me, as a typical Singaporean, I look at practicality. If I had a comfortable budget, I would really get those top-of-the-range tube amps and experiment with lots of boutique or modified pedals with mojo, and for performances, I’d get my own transport for my half stack (or full stack) etc. This is because analogues keeps your original signal alive, ie the output is your original signal modified. Digital on the other hand, takes your input, kill it totally and reproduce a similar signal of what the processor thinks should be the modified version. There’s a slight difference but not a great one because emulating technology is improving fast.
However, that remains on my wish list. I fall back to my current situation and look at what I'm doing now. I have al cheapo budget (tight but not non-existent) and I want consistency in terms of tone and volume control when I am performing with my band. We’ve got no sound man to tweak our volume on the PA and I don’t have a kick-ass amp I can bring around (even if I do, I live on the 8th floor of a HDB and the lifts are on the 6th and the 11th floors so…). What can I do to get what I need? Single effects, a volume pedal and pray that the locations in which I’m performing has the specific amps I want? Use the clean channel on the amps and rely solely on stomp box distortions? That would truly be limiting myself especially when I require big wall of cabs type of distortions.
That’s why I recently turned to multi-effects (I use to condemn these “shits” due to a false impression that all of them suck and sound “digital”… So much for listening to snobs who listened from snobs who listened from snobs who were influenced by snobs.) I was a bit more open to multi-effects units when some of my friends acquired them and we sat around playing with the sound. One thing we noticed were how powerful the modulations were and how ugly sounding the distortions were without a good amp and cab simulation.
Keeping the weakness of multi-effects in mind (mainly drive tones) I went to seek out multi-effects with an external effects loop such as the Boss GT-8 and the Pod X3 Live. I’m currently using the Pod X3 Live and to my surprise, the amp and cab simulation responded very well to my stomp box distortions in the external effects loop.
Now, whoever said single effects should never be used in conjunction with a multi-effects or amp/cab simulators? I’d advise you to balance out what you want, rather deciding purely from facts on paper. Don’t be fooled or swayed by people giving biased one-sided views on either type of pedals. Different multi-effects, like single effects counterparts, have many differences. A Pod XT and a Pod X3 is different, just like how a ds-2 and a ds-1 is different. Just like you can't say Boss suck, Roland suck, Gibson suck and guitars suck, you can't say multi-effects suck nor can you say single effects suck. One advise is to avoid cheap and entry-level multi-effects units because if you think about it, a multi-effects unit is already “very cheap” for the effects you are getting.
A view is still just a view! Multi effect units are great in their own ways..
