Hey guys, yesterday me and my drummer got to fool around with my stuff. I brought my "hell guitar" (a double humbucker mini Strat-style body with scalloped fretboard and gauge 10 stainless strings with an average string height of 5mm, yikes!) and my
RP500 to his dormitory and ran it through the FX return of his amp, an AVT2000 which he borrowed from a friend.
Take note that my drummer was once a full-time guitarist but decided to quit after meeting too many guitar shredders in our school. He knew quite a lot about effects pedals, and is also my go-to person when I need advice for guitar tone. He swears by analog pedals and tube amplifiers, and was actually dissatisfied with the AVT (not unlike most of us, really) and the sounds it had.
At first, we fooled around with just the amp modeling of the RP500 and a couple of effects. The amp models were pretty ok, but they kinda lack realism somewhat, so I decided to let him try to fool around with it. He removed the amp/cab modeling and set it to direct, ran a DS-1 dirt pedal model on and added a tinge of delay and reverb and what came out of the amp frightened us. Right there was the most realistic dirt tone I have ever heard since I first ran a dimed DS-2 in front of a cranked Fender Showman!
After a while he got a bit tired of the singing lead tone, and I tried turning on the semi-parametric EQ model which the RP500 also had. A few tweaks and the dull clean tone that one would hear when the dirt pedal was disengaged (due to the guitar going directly into the power amp without a tone stack) became sweet again, plus the dirt tone started to sing even more!
We didn't stop there, however. Now my drummer wanted a heavy crunch sound for more hardcore riffs (which I admittedly am not a fan of) and so we tried running the MT-2 dirt pedal model. Again, I added the EQ and tweaked the parameters of the MT-2 such that the MT-2 model would provide great low-end content while the EQ would remove the nasal qualities inherent in the original sound and add some presence. Not that I am saying the RP500 sounded like a Mesa Dual Recto or anything (I haven't even tried plugging into one yet!) but the crunch sounds we got were so full, powerful, and natural that we got even more frightened the more we turned the knobs to fine tune the sound.
Even my drummer, a tube snob and analog pedal loyalist, agreed that the RP500 exceeded his expectations, and that he was very happy with the sounds we got from the little devil. "Now," he said, "imagine this thing being run through YOUR LC50-II!" Seeing how much the pedal gave life to an otherwise crappy amp (he said so himself!) we both nodded our heads in agreement.
Now, I am not saying that this would replace the tube amplifiers and analog stompboxes we all know and love, but goddamn Digitech! You are being too kind to us by selling such a highly satisfying product at a relatively low price! The technology used in the RP series pedals is killer, and I am now totally satisfied with the pedal. To the other RP owners, try it out!
EDIT: I forgot to mention that the hell guitar was a no-namer, manufactured in China and had really badly-worn frets due to the stainless steel. It had a lot of damages, notably its inability to switch to a full neck humbucker position, plus the cheap pickups had a somewhat dull character compared to my 2 Ibanez guitars, one with Evos and another with a Breed B/Air Norton N combination. We will try to post clips ASAP for you guys to judge
