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Looper's Delight
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Andre writes: >-- As has been commonly mentioned here before, the factory presets don't >do the unit any sort of justice. Not only is the selection of basic >effects pretty tame, but the actual effects level is far too subtle to be >noticed in a guitar store environment. Like I said, there was little if >anything in the factory sounds to suggest that the unit was capable of >some of the things it can actually do; most of the stock patches sounded >like a good chorus/delay unit with a lousy control interface. The subtle >velocity-sensitive bits and stereo panning details will never come across >in Guitar Center, even under the best of circumstances. And most of the >preset pairs are so similar that I didn't even know I was engaging >morphing most of the time. When I first broght the unit to Vernon Reid, I went through the presets, one by one. He thought it was cool, but wasn't overwhelmed. Then I set up a register pair of Bleen and Fractal, grabbed the e-bow, held down a note and morphed between-em. He freaked out over it. "Why didn't you show me this first?!?!" He grabbed the guitar, and stated getting completely sick. It was great fun. The sales staff at Lexicon have a tendedcy to believe in make everything useful, saily, right out of the box. An incredible time is spent on presets--and when you plug in nany reverb from them (from Alex right on up the line), you're not likely to have to do much alteration to find a sound that's right for what you're doing. But Vortex is different, and I think you're right. The presets are way too tame, and that coupled with lack of MIDI (#1 problem) were the two biggest oversights in the device. As for other issues, I can only state, again, that when the engineering management forces a package on the designers (in the case of Vertex, the Alex box), you have to make sacrifices. There's no bypass switch because there wasn't one on Alex. Nothing could be done. MIDI was not an option because of price. It was in the original spec, but taken out because of cost. Take it or leave it. In a lot of ways, there were people who made it impossible for the marketing team to really have any say over what would end up in the box. This is what we often referred to as "sales prevention". An ugly situation, which as near as I can tell, continues to worsen since my departure. Sad, really. Some really great ideas are simply being throuwn away, and very good people are getting fed up and leaving. Do I sound bitter?