Boss GT-10 Review

It feels like Christmas when I get that knock on the door at 9:20am this morning to find the courier man smiling with a large bubble-wrapped package containing my anticipated new toy.

He wasn't smiling. I made that part up, but yes I like getting "presents" even if it happens to be bought by me.

Here we have the Boss GT-10, multi-effect processor.

I had mixed feeling about this one. My first try was through a Roland JC-120 (It's a VERY common test amp here in Japan). I was actually quite unimpressed at that time.

My second try was comparing it against the Line 6 M13 stompbox multi, that initially I preferred more.

This time the winner was the Boss. Presets are really not a good way to test out Boss effects. I stripped out some effects to hear the "real" sound, and I think the GT-10 feels more versatile. The M13 seems like you have to do more of a tap dance to change sounds not unlike having separate stomp boxes in front of you.

So anyway. I plugged it directly in through the front of my Mesa and just like in the shop it sounded quite nice. I thought I'd have to use the 4CM method to plug it up, but it sounds fine to me this way.

I think the valves actually warm up the sound a bit. If there's a weakness it's in the distorted tones. There is a "Boss" sound that is slightly metallic, and at it's worst sounds nasally, like a wah left on in a mid position, but having said that for my style of music the tones I found were more than useable.

I had considered previously to get a Digitech Whammy and a delay pedal that would have easily cost as much or more than this unit. This baby has that, and much more. An added bonus to all the great effects is a direct to PC USB interface, and a nice little looper for cool solo jams and testing out sound patches.

It has noise suppressors which make my amp virtually silent compared to my amp's internal overdrive. I didn't get to turn it up to give a full impression of it's sound. (Japanese apartments aren't really the best place to test out guitar amplifiers), but I'm happy with this.

For those interested, useful information can be found here (web archive) and some excellent Youtube videos here.

It's a nice piece of kit, that's for sure.