Yamaha GC-100

fairly difficult

discutably, bad

allright

don't know

First impression, not to good. It's a very strange pedal in my opinion. In the first place, it sounds very 'effect-like'. You can make very extreme compressor-like sounds with it, and I suppose it's impossible not to hear the sound is manipulated by a electric device. That's quite allright, but i like disco-sounds also. When hou are a double righthanded electrician, it's a nice pedal to work upon, but the flanger-like sound from it may be to weak, or in my opinion to subtle to work with, and i still don't know what yamaha-music thinks about that. If you want a compressor or limiter you better get an other pedal.

It's nothing complex. Sure, you got a whole bunch of sliders to play with, but all but three of them are EQ, and the last ones are just 'sustain', 'attack' and 'level', so it's just as easy to use as any stompbox...if not a little bit easier because you can be exact avout what position the slider is in, which isn't always the case with a plastic knob. As for getting a good sound out of it...well with the EQ it's largely about taste, but I found it difficult to get the kind of compression I was really looking for.

I use a couple of fairly inexpensive guitars with less aggressive pickups than I'd like if I had more money, which is largely why I got this pedal - to boost the sound of my single coil neck pickups. I was hoping to brighten the sound and make it cut through a little better. I usually play through headphones, since I recently moved to Canada and don't have any amp worth mentioning right now.

One of the first things I noticed was that with this pedal, even with the 'attack' turned all the way up, the guitar sound starts louder and gets suddenly quieter, which was very annoying. I also found that the loudest volume setting was not very loud - a large boost in the signal was not possible with this pedal!

The EQ part itself is good, you can get a lot of tones...but if there's one thing I wish I'd realised before I bought this pedal it is this - a compressor goes before distortion, and what's the point in having an EQ before your distortion? If you're playing clean then the EQ is great, but when you put your distortion on, the effect totall fades away and all you're left with is the sustain. I'd much rather get seperate compression and EQ pedals and put them in the right places.

Oh yeah, and this pedal is noisEEE! It really tries to boost the volume aggressively when you're not playing (which is the only time it really does get aggressive!) and the hiss is terrible - I have to turn the pedal off for even the slightest pause in the playing.

For sure, it's made of metal and it seems sturdy enough. The plastic sliders aren't the most robust but looking at the layout of it I think you'd have to be mistreating your pedal quite seriously for anything bad to happen to them.

No clue, never had to deal with them. Since I don't think I'll be keeping this pedal for long I don't guess I ever will.

I do alternative rock, and all I wanted out of this pedal was to help my guitars cut through with a bit of extra trebel and overall volume, particularly when using single coil pickups which, on my guitars, are fairly weak but lovely sounding. This doesn't give the kind of compression I like, and whilst I would keep it just for the EQ, it's a noisy pedal on any setting so that kind of defeats the purpose. I think that if the 'volume' slider could bring the signal up louder this pedal would be a lot better, but as it is I need something that can add more punch to my signal. I'm going to try to get a DOD FX80-B, since I've tried a DOD compressor before, and most of my current pedals are DOD and I love them all!