talk to me about the Boss RV-6 (NPD page 2)

[marqueemoon]

how does the RV-6 compare to the other RVs? the older ones never did it for me just too fake/digital but i do like what the rv-500 is promising. RV-6 sits between these quality wise?

In terms of older versions I've only messed with the RV-3 a little bit, but my feeling is the RV-6 is fake sounding in a good way. The more standard sounds like plate and spring are decent, but that's not really the attraction for me.

[marqueemoon]

Picked it up yesterday and spent several hours playing with it. It's pretty great. The modulated setting works really well with a low powered tube amp and is actually my favorite. The other player I was playing with has a much more complex board, but even with all that stuff happening it creates this nice bright space that helps the guitar cut, and there's a pleasant breathy quality when clean that doesn't sound cheesy when distorted.

I guess the one negative is while all the sounds are usable each requires some knob tweaking, and what works for one mode usually doesn't work for others. For example shimmer sounds corny without some serious tone rolloff. One of my favorite techniques is to "bow" the wound strings by scraping them with the pick which sounds pretty cool with the shimmer, but if I wanted to, say, do that early in a song then switch to a more conventional reverb for picking I'd need to do some really fast knob twiddling. Still, I would rather have one pedal I can really get to know than a bunch to handle different tasks.