Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!
Today we are reviewing another legacy product, which was on the market around the year 2000: the Zoom Gfx 707 (often called just Zoom 707)!
In a time in which most of the beginning guitar players were starting with an ultra cheap guitar and a Zoom 505 (click here for the review), the 707 was already a step forward, the multieffect with the expression pedal to make solos with wah, like Jimi Hendrix or Kirk Hammett, and whoever had an expression pedal was destined to be unavoidably the lead guitarist in any high school band.
When researching information about this unit, I have found out (here) some detail that I didn't expect at all: this unit is not fully digital, it has an analog part (which is composed by the Compression, Limiting, Noise Gate, Gain, Distortion, Sustain, Fuzz, EQ and Amp simulator) and a digital one which comprehends all the effects (Reverb, Modulation, Pitch shift, Harmonizer etc).
The unit can run with batteries or with dc adaptor and unlike the 505 offers mono and stereo otuput, to play with stereo effects.
So, how does it sound? Well, by today's standards, it doesn't sound well.
The characteristic of Zoom back then was to cram these ultra cheap devices with as many amps and effects as possible (and a drum machine too, which was actually quite useful for practicing!), aiming clearly to sell quantity over quality, plus this unit came out just one year before the revolutionary POD 2.0, and it had an interface which was all but intuitive.
Is it possible to obtain good sounds? Probably for some genre yes. The problem is that you need to pass through an interface that is not easy at all and to know your way around, and it is probably better to start from zero than from one of the patches, since they are just very, very caricatural, with the high gain ones so scooped and compressed that are usable probably just for some industrial rock riff.
Does it deserve to be bought today? Only if you find a very good deal and you are only looking for effects and maybe some clean tone, in this case the unit can be useful if found for 30/50 bucks, but if you need some overdrive or distortion there are many other units on the market that can get you a much better tone, also for cheap.
Thumbs down!
- 74 guitar effects (up to 10 can be used simultaneously)
No comments:
Post a Comment