Multi effects units

[WEDGE]

I have gone through a bunch of these over the years including a Kemper, Pod Go, Line 6 M9, Zoom G3xn, Digitech RP1, etc. and some sounded amazing and the rest were certainly good to great. But they all were more or less wonky to program and set up, and tweaking was like having to program a 1980’s mainframe to run Cobalt. Been there and it isn’t fun.

Other than the Kemper which has amazing amp tones I only need the others for adding effects and allowing me to create scenes and do one touch changes between tones. in short I need 10% of their capability but they are 90% harder to program and tweak than I want.

I wanted something easy to use and cheap for my office and just got in a used Boss ME-50 which does everything I want, sounds great, is dead easy to set up and create patches, and has KNOBS to make changes with. Old school ease of use with Boss effects. I love this thing. Plus I got it shipped to me for 75 Bucks. Win win. It doesn’t make my lunch but is compact, and sounds great for my needs. No slam on you guys that can program these modern units, they sound killer, but I have limited needs and this works for me. thought I would pass it on, even as a backup effects unit these are great for around a C note.

 

[alantig]

... like having to program a 1980’s mainframe to run Cobalt. Been there and it isn’t fun.

My geekiness compels me to point out that it's COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language, and I have no idea why that definition popped into my head because I haven't thought about it in decades) and note that it's still part of my retirement plan.

 

[WEDGE]

Been a few years Alan, I went to programming school in ‘82 …….COBOL, Fortran , Assembler……..I still have nightmares…….

Thankfully I missed punch cards by a short while but had to practically live at the school because that’s there the terminals and mainframe were. Type in your program, finds tons of bugs, ……enter the ‘fixes’ and repeat endless times……thank god i didn’t decide to do it for a living…..

 

[alantig]

Oh, punch cards! Still had them my first year of college. I transferred to a different school after two years rather than move to main campus. For my COBOL class, we had to punch five cards each to load the data set for the course. There were maybe two punch machines on campus. The day I went to do my cards, there was a guy punching his ahead of me. A friend of his came in to do his cards. Took the guy forever to do five cards. He got up, I sat down, and his buddy said, "Damn, are you finally done?" He said, "Dude, this thing is impossible. I don't know how people used them. You're gonna be here awhile." I said, "Done - it's all yours" and walked out.

It was part of a job I got a few years later - we had to punch cards for our JCL decks. That helped me get in there - that and killing the programming test. It was half COBOL, half Assembler. I'd still been doing COBOL, but I hadn't done Assembler since my first two years of college, so five years at the time. I finished the first part of the test, reviewed, then put my head down to wait for everyone else (there was a lunch break between). The woman monitoring the test came over and asked if I was okay. I said I was, I was just done. I caught a head or two turning when I said that. She said, "Well, wouldn't you like to review it?" I said, "I did. Twice." A couple more heads. She told me to go to lunch early. Come back for the Assembler part, and I'm nervous because I haven't done it in a long time. Fortunately, we had manuals to refer to (both parts of the test). First question, I think I know the answer, but I looked it up just to be sure. Same thing for the next two, and I realized I hadn't forgotten much. Finished, reviewed, head down. The monitor comes over again, asks if I'm done. I say yes, and I notice a lot of people turning towards me. She asks if I wanted to review, I said I had, again twice. She looked at my paper for my name and said, "Well, I guess you can guess you can go, Alan." And just about everybody in the room looked at me when I left. I told my wife I either killed it or blew it - there was no way it was going to be in the middle. When I went in for the interview a week or so later, it was with the woman monitoring the test (for the HR part). She said, "I thought you were just blowing the test off, but it's been a long time since someone did that well on this." I was kind of stunned. Got the job.

And punch cards were a trip. One of my first professors (who was a great teacher) told us to number our cards. He said, "You'll want to skip that step because it's a pain, but the first time you drop a deck, you'll be glad you did." So, after 15 weeks or so w/no problems, we all started shortcutting that step. And yes, it is a major pain to resort a deck of about 300 punch cards when the type is faint because the ribbon is old.

 

[WEDGE]

Congrats, that’s strong. I was 17 when I started the programming classes and was a fish out of water. I was going at night and the class was all adults coming from real jobs and I was a kid with long hair and a Van Halen t shirt. Was never going to end well.

 

[Birdsofprey]

Unless I’m using separate effects pedals it’s my Boss ME-50. Gets everything I need played out with it, has never broken down and didn’t need a degree to use it. Plus one for me.

 

[bodia]

Killer deal! And, I remember those COBOL and programming classes, plus all of the punch cards, from high school in the early 80s....ugh!

 

[alantig]

Congrats, that’s strong. I was 17 when I started the programming classes and was a fish out of water. I was going at night and the class was all adults coming from real jobs and I was a kid with long hair and a Van Halen t shirt. Was never going to end well.

Killer deal! And, I remember those COBOL and programming classes, plus all of the punch cards, from high school in the early 80s....ugh!

My first programming class was as a senior in high school. Up until then, I was going to go to school to be an electrical engineer. Never occurred to me that I could be a programmer. Our computer (one!) in HS was some little HP with literally a tiny screen and a thermal printer. That year, we went to a math/tech skills competition thing at Edinboro University. We had a five-person programming team, and there were two teams in our room, something like 12 overall. The other team in our room divided things up, and had this whole organization thing going on. On our team, we looked at the four or five problems, and three people said, "Yeah - we're out. There's no way we can do any of this." I took one, another guy took another. We didn't finish either. That other team kicked our a$$es. Then they announced the results - we finished three places ahead of them. I realize now that it's very much a model of management - just because you look like you know what you're doing doesn't mean you do. It's the people who seem half-crazy (or more) that get things done.

 

[WEDGE]

I took basic and advanced basic in high school which gave me the idea to program. We had a printer at each terminal, no screens. We had a cool space game where we would tell it to jump to another quadrant in space, and the dot would appear on the next print out somewhere else. I thought that was the coolest **** ever!

I still have in the basement the Radio Shack TRS-80 handheld computer my dad bought me for practicing basic. Dinosaur!

 

[bodia]

I took basic and advanced basic in high school which gave me the idea to program. We had a printer at each terminal, no screens. We had a cool space game where we would tell it to jump to another quadrant in space, and the dot would appear on the next print out somewhere else. I thought that was the coolest **** ever!

I still have in the basement the Radio Shack TRS-80 handheld computer my dad bought me for practicing basic. Dinosaur!

I remember those!

 

[alantig]

This is what we had in high school. I was in the first class to use this thing. Can't complain about it - it got me started on the path to where I am today. Well...

HP-85.

 

[bodia]

This is what we had in high school. I was in the first class to use this thing. Can't complain about it - it got me started on the path to where I am today. Well...

HP-85.

I remember those, too!

 

[aphantomvaper]

At my school, early 80's, we had punch card COBOL machines. The Seniors would sell them to the Freshmen as elevator passes which I did not fall for, already being a computer geek at 14.

Haven't done programming for a good long while though. I'm still in IT and hire people to do that **** for me.

 

[tailedparallel]

My first programming class was as a senior in high school. Up until then, I was going to go to school to be an electrical engineer. Never occurred to me that I could be a programmer. Our computer (one!) in HS was some little HP with literally a tiny screen and a thermal printer. That year, we went to a math/tech skills competition thing at Edinboro University. We had a five-person programming team, and there were two teams in our room, something like 12 overall. The other team in our room divided things up, and had this whole organization thing going on. On our team, we looked at the four or five problems, and three people said, "Yeah - we're out. There's no way we can do any of this." I took one, another guy took another. We didn't finish either. That other team kicked our a$$es. Then they announced the results - we finished three places ahead of them. I realize now that it's very much a model of management - just because you look like you know what you're doing doesn't mean you do. It's the people who seem half-crazy (or more) that get things done.

Gold but hard times. Now programming is not as impossible as it was before. My son studying in the cybersecurity faculty and programming is one of the lessons in his course. Must say that he often uses this source https://paperap.com/how-to-write-a-rhetorical-analysis/ to get help with abstracts and other writing tasks, but he enjoys coding so much and do all tasks by himself. Idk how it works but I think the brains of modern teens work differently than ours at the same age.