Zoom 505

Easy as eating pancake

Ok so listen up if you are just starting to play guitar and planning to do live. like me. I was using this effecter for my 10w small practice amp. It sounded alright. I could play a riff of system of a down toxicity and chop suey pretty fine with heavy metal effect.
but i used bigger amp on live. it was terrible. it turned 6 minutes of hell. riff was wiped by bass drum and destortion was wiped by noise. just terrible. i do want to forget what happend then. i recommend Ibanez Smashbox effecter. use this for practice. but remember pedal sux too.

no not on live
but practice maybe

just for practice kids

pretty easy to use,it takes approx. 5 minutes to figure it out. the manual explains everything.

I play dream theater and queensryche style progressive metal and some megadeth and pink floyd stuff. If you wanna play progressive stuff or metal (or anything distorted) the 505 won't do .if you use it with headphones, it might sound o.k., but no chance to get good distorted / overdriven sound on an amp (I tried a few, torques,marshalls,crates. it's very noisy and digital sounding. forget about using this for serious recordings or on stage. the acoustic sounds (reverb, delay, slight flange) are nice, though.

i just bought a boss gt3, so I wouldn't use it on a gig, but i've had the 505 for 3 years now and never had a problem with it. a friend of mine once dropped his 505 and it sort of fell appart, so I wouldn't try this.

never had a problem (expect the crappy sound, lol), so i dunno

Despite the 4 for the sound quality my overall rating is 7, because I think this is the best (and probably cheapest) choice for a beginning musician on low budget or someone who travels a lot like me. i gig and record things with my boss gt3, but it weights about a ton, and i do practice 5-6 hours each day, and it's much easier to carry the 505 around and it doesn't sound too bad through headphones. if you want a good sounding fx check out the boss gt3 or some line6 POD stuff.

CHECK OUT THE FOLLOWING UNDREGROUND PROGRESSIVE ACTS:

Stonehenge, Pain of Salvation, Without Face, chaos IN gray
great music.

It's kinda hard to understand what everything does. But good thing for the manual! Editing patches could be a pain, as well as selecting them.

When I first bought this pedal, I was new to the guitar. So I didn't know anything about tone and the like. Back then it sounded all right to me, but now a days the effects sound very cheap. When I finally upgraded my amp from a cheap 10 watt Yamaha to a 50 watt Marshall- I had to get rid of the pedal. It was ridiculously noisy. Especially on the distorted patches. But the pedal did a good job getting close to emulating other artist's tone- such as Creed and Metallica. But I would never use it again for performing. The other bad thing is that when you switch between patches, there's a delay that gets very annoying, especially if you're going for dirty to clean (or vice versa). It's very noticeable.

This pedal has never broken down on me. so it seemed to have been reliable.

Never had to deal with them.

This pedal is good for beginners who know nothing about guitars, like how i used to. But if you start getting good and start playing in front of other people, upgrade quickly. This pedal is not meant to get studio quality sound. I ended up selling it a while back and bought other pedals. I probably won't buy another zoom product, nor will i get a multi-effect processor again. Those things are pains in the butts to work with, especially if you have to switch inbetween patches.

Pretty easy to use. If you've ever dealt with a multi-effects pedal, it's a piece of cake.

None of the effects are terribly bad, but none are very good either. I wouldn't count on using the distortion for anything much, but other than that it sounds fine. If you really work with it, you can get some decent sounds, but I'm just sticking with my Boss single effect pedals.

It's plastic. I've had minor problems with it, but nothing serious. I wouldn't count on owning one for decades, but its not going to break in half on its first use.

A good beginner effects pedal, because you get a lot of effects for a fairly cheap price. I wouldn't gig or record with it. I play mainly hard rock/grunge type stuff, and this didn't suit me very well. The delay, flanger and chorus effects that I was really looking for weren't great, (but what do you expect from 50 bucks, really). I would only recommend this pedal to beginners who want to see if a multi effects is for them. If not, spend the extra for a boss or digitech multi-effets processor.

yeah...easy.....real easy....exceedingly easy....you don't need no stinkin' manual.....

i like the choruses.....frankly, i haven't delved too deeply, as this is but one member of an arsenal of toys....the tuner's cool....i play it thru a fender blues jr. a randall 212 combo, a peavey bandit, and a marshall vs65r....tradition les paul clones, and a mexistrat, plus other odd assorted guitars

yeah, it's alright....no throwing it against the wall, though

dunno

bought it 'cuz it was cheap...needed a multifx....it's ok....will buy another

Fairly simple up or down edit dtore ...easy

Several custome guitars, Gibson P100's, Seymore Duncan pickups into a 72 Twin. I would give this a great rating for a headphone amp. It fitts in your case and is easy to travel with which is why I bought it about 5 years ago. Just reciently I pulled it out of the box to play around with and instantly remembered why I put it in the Box. The sound absolutly sucks!!! Reverb is OK but my twin has plenty of that. The distortion leaves much to be desired, I hate compression anyway but this one is awful, forget about the wah, flanger is noisy, the unit overall hisses at you, the amp modeling is commical well amp "modeling" in it self is really kinda funny.

It lasted very well for several years in a box in my closet which if u get one you will find that this is the best use for it. But since it is made out of cheap plastic you know its only a matter of time.

never used it

I play mostly hard rock to fusion and have been playing about 12 years I also build guitars so I am very conscience of tone. I run my guitar signal through a rack of Boss pedals and think they give the best and most reliable sound for the price. If this unit were stolen I would feel very sorry for the thief. I really do like it for a hotel head phone amp though I must admit. But if you are interested in getting a signature tone you wil not find it here. I got this unit b/c it was cheap and I was on the road and wanted a headphone amp. A lot of comments here were saying that it would be good for a beginner I would suggest that the beginner get a nice guitar with a great amp and start there. some of the best punk, metal, fusion ect was played this way period. dont be fooled by "plastic" sounding effects...

It's a little tricky at first, but you'll get the hang of it in just a few hours...

It's got a few effects built in. It is a multi effect processor after all. The problem is that alla the effects sound terrible! This was my first effect and I still have it. Nowadays I use it for one thing, the reverb for my accoustic guitar. Nothing else. Why? As I said. Its a terrible effect processor! Sounds like crap.

It has never faild me. Never... Ill give it a nine bacause of the footswitch. Its getting looser by the day!

Never dealt with them, so I can't really tell.

It's a great unit for those who have no feeling for great tone! It's a great unit for those who've just begun playing guitar and have no idea of what it should sound like. It's not that expensive (therefor the quality of the unit). You get what you pay for.

If someone stole my Zoom 505, I would never ever buy a new one!

Easy to use if you read the manual. Takes quite a while (a few minutes) to set up your own patches, but on the web people have set up their own databases - so its easy to get a close approximation to some of the great guitarist's sounds.

The manual is clear and easy

Sound quality is debateable - overall its great and for what I paid it is worth it as a very versatile wah-wah pedal or flanger or digital delay - or all three.

Noise is controllable with the built in filters - so no excuses.

Effects are variable - delay flanger chorus wah wah are all good. Some of the amp models are a bit wierd - some are good.

Easy to get many Hedrix, Santana, Morcheeba type sounds.

My main bithc - if there is one - is that it 'knocks back' the Blues breaker that I preceed it with in my effects loop. It would be useful to be able to control gain without having to have an amp model in the set up prior to this.

This thing EATS BATTERIES. One PP3 lasted 8 minutes. Or rather it doesnt eat them - just strips the top end away and is very voltage sensitive. Bateries taken out of it have worked for weeks in other pedals. SOLUTION was a #12.50 regulated power supply - its been ultra-reliable since its use - with a power supply - NO PROBLEMS.

It's made of some sort of balistic plastic and is very robust - have gigged with it.

Good web site - manuals available for free download in PDF format.

This thing came with the additional FPO2 foot pedal in the price - a volume /or WAH pedal - so great value

The 505 is incredibly easy to use -- I only spent a few minutes with the instruction manual, and then never picked it up again. Sometimes it is hard to keep background hiss out, but it is possible after working with it for a moment (as opposed to the otherwise easy as all hell programming.) And for the price, I'm not complaining.

I have this set up with my Yamaha RGX-312 guitar (its an old '87 rip-off of an Ibanez.), and I use a Crate GFX-15 Amp. For its price, the sound quality is quite good, and there are a crapload of patches published on the internet, so I can get pretty much any tone I want. The sound quality is good, not amazing, just good. You get what you payed for. (Not necessarily in a bad way.)

It great, very sturdy, and I like it.

Never dealed with 'em.

I would recommend it to someone who wants somethin in the price range, and this thing has gone strong for me ever since I bought it off of eBay. Today I am ordering the FP02 expression pedal for it, so I'll see how that works out for me. Good pedal. But there is better out there.

after a little bit of fiddling, the 505 is very, very easy to use.

i used a Gibson SG clone from circa 1980 (el degas), and a squier stagemaster 7 string. i've got a fender jam amp. the 505 worked great on lower volumes with the clean tone on, but anything higher than about 3.5 on the master volume turned the distortion part to crap. the pedal has no individual effect EQ, just amp modelling and a main EQ for every effect being used. almost better to go with seperate pedals for every effect.

reliable as hell, always worked for me.

i had it repaired because it got wet in a small basement flood and it worked great for about 2 months. i had it fixed because it shorted. took about 7 weeks (!) to get the thing fixed, and it was good as new then.

i'm a big metal fan. mostly korn and deftones, stuff like that. this pedal's great if you just want to jam by yourself, because if you're learning a new song with effects including in the transcription, you can just change the settings to whatever you need to. 6 banks with 4 spots each = 24 user programmable slots. with 9 different settings per effect, this pedal has lots of variety. the delays are especially good. 8 distortions, i used mostly the Metal setting, with the amp model on 9 and the EQ on 25 to get a ballsier sound for the 7 string i own. this pedal is great for stuff like incubus too, which uses a lot of delays and phaser effects. because it doesn't have a seperate EQ for each effect though, having a stack or a combo is better than just a plain amp. note: if you want sustain in your distortion, stay the hell away from the "distortion" setting ("dT" on the pedal)!
anyways, its a fairly good pedal. if in America, pick it up for about $125 or less. elsewhere, look forward to $150 or higher. its worth it to explore different guitar sounds, but i'd stick with individual pedals if you want more managablilty in your sound.