Zoom 3030

NOT BAD... you need to set the unit up on something where you can get a good look at it when you program the patches (I duct tape mine on top of my bass rig [a GK 800RB on a Ampeg dual 15 SVT style cab.] so that I can see it and it aint sliding around when I'm mashing the buttons and trying out sounds as you go is convenient). Its an analog unit with lots of quality sounds... I use it for bass... for which the chorusing and the wah wah patches are well adapted, unfortunately the harmonizing patches are useless for bass as are most of the pre-sets but no matter... you didn't pay $200 bucks for a unit you aint gonna twiddle the knobs on anyway... Once you have it programed its works great... foot switches are positive and seem sturdy as does the "expression pedal"... I wish the F/SW were further apart... give it an 8, you can dance to it

not noisy... includes a noise gate feature, obtusely called "ZNR" for Zoom Noise Reduction, solid analog versions of a whole range of classic sounds... includes master volumn and patch volumn control broad and parametric eq banks (with 3 Q settings)... compression wah wah, auto wah, 9 types of distortion (there's a nifty Tub Screamer clone called "lead", a shit kicking "metal" and a good fuzz, flange & phase (very good range and adjustability), mono or stereo chorusing and other delay effects (including a nice ping pong delay), pitch bending, harmonizing (which don't work for bass) and even wave form addition (wierd but cool.. try out the "metallic" parameter at low settings)... for the money, give it a 9

seems like a tough little unit.. if kept out of the hands of drunken roadies

These guys know what they are doing... but it aint broke so I haven't had to try and fix it... give a 5 due to insufficient information

I'd buy another if the one I have were stolen (after feeding the bum to the fishes), great sounds... I wish the foot switches were further apart and the harmonizer would track bass freq.s other than that its superlative. For guitar placer with small feet it'd be perfect... VERY ATTRACTIVE PRICE you get a lot for you money

Everything is pretty straight forward. I checked this out at the local music store, so I knew what to do. The manual is pretty easy to get through. And editing patches is straight forward. I found this unit user friendly.
The sound is pretty good. You have to watch the output levels because a lot of the patches have a big difference in volume. The presets are a good indicator of the number of sounds you can get out of this thing. One drawback is that there are about 12 presets that are unusable in a gig situation.

The sounds are pretty good. The unit is pretty quiet (background noise) on about all of the presets. As for the sound quality. Distortions: someone into heavy metal would really like this thing. It's a tad muuch for my tastes though. Compressor/EQ.: Can really get a boost out of the unit with these.
WAH/ Auto-Wah: Pretty good. I was hoping for a more flexable Auto-Wah. Basically, it's in 4 different modes, and something for the color of the sound. The pedal Wah is pretty good though, but a little unstable.
Chourus/Phase/Flange: Sound just like the stomp box equivalents. The flange is kind of hard to control. Phase and Chorus are pretty good though.
Delay is pretty good.
Reverb is a a little too much for my tastes.
Haven't tried the metalic, step filter, of the Auto Pan yet.
Tremelo is cool, and the Pitch shifter rules !!!.
as for the other stuff, haven't checked it out yet.
In a nutshell, this sounds pretty good.

It's plastic. So you need a very very very light touch. If you are a heavy Wah user, get a Crybaby/Vox/DOD pedal, because I don't think this thing can take it.
Haven't went to the gig with it yet.
I think I can depend on it if I was sort of careful

Just got it, no need for customer service.

I would buy it again. One thing I need for this unit is a foot switch so I can go into edit mode ( I think there is one out there ), so in a preset, I can turn off an effect when I don't want it. Without it, you would have to reach down and press this very small button to get into edit mode.
One thing I didn't like were some of the presets. This unit has 28 User presets and 28 factory presets. There are about 5-6 presets in each group that were unusable. The user presets can be changed, but the factory presets will be set back to their original values when the machine is turned off. I would like to see all of the "unusable" presets in the User preset group.( Is ZOOM listening ?? )
I would also like to see an on/off switch on this thing.
I bought this because of 1) The price 2) The control over the effects 3) The expression pedal 4) And something I can't think of right now.
This pedal would RULE if these conditions are met. 1) Metal case and expression pedal 2) The ability to permantly change the factory presets 3) A built in foot switch to change between play/ edit mode. 4) A master volume knob. 5) And a few other things I can't think of right now.

It's real easy to use. Except that the descriptions printed on the patch parameter stickers are hard to make out.

Sounds great. The distortion gain quickly pushes the sound over the top. I'd like a little more sensitivity in the first four numbers on the gain.

It hasn't broken yet. I'm worried about the plastic pedal, though.

Love it. Great value. Compact. Good sound.

This guy is really easy to use and edit patches with. However, it's all pushbutton scrolling and no knobs. Guitarists tend to think with round things and not numbers. The manual is minimal but it gives all the neccessary information.

The unit is less noisy than most individual pedals and its mostly due to ZNR from the distortion setting. However, with the ZNR all the way up, I still got some hum when the distortion settings were cranked all the way up. I primarily play guitar for tape uses and for that reason this unit is not the best. For live puroposes this unit is a great value.

The construction is all plastic-including the pedal, however, for $240 you really can't ask for army tank construction. If you dropped this thing off a buuilding it would probably shatter but you shouldn't be doing that anyway. I would have no qualms about taking this to a gig except that it uses a wall wart- but that's not a big deal.

Zoom/Samson is constanly back ordered for their new guitar stuff. I'm not sure if this is the retailer's fault that I deal with or if its ZOOM's supplying glitch.

I stopped playing live a few months back and was looking for something to help me put that miked cabinet sound on tape. This one doesn't quite do that despite its 3 cabinet simulators. The sound is to tizzy. Too bad they didn't make this thing 5 years ago. I have an ART SGE and about 8 pedals and this ZOOM thing would've done more, better, and cost less.

This effects processor is pretty easy to use compared to digitech stuff and also has a suprising amount of options to choose from when programming the effects. But you definatly need the manual for this one to figure out what all the numbers on the two-digit display mean. The manual does a reasonable job at explaining everything but they could have gone a little more in depth on some stuff. But then again, this manual was written for guitar players, not technicians.

It rocks! The distortion is matter of personal taste. I like it alot though it can be a little too fuzzy or trebly sounding on some patches. But you can get real crunchy heavy metal and death metal sounds out of this thing as well as some so-so blues sounds. The noise reduction does an excellent job of cutting out hiss without cutting off your reverb and delay tails. Also the compressor does a good job of both compressing and limiting, but it is just a tad noisy. The reverbs and delays sound fairly good, the chorus, phase, and flanger effects sound awesome espeacially in stereo. The pitch shifter is also pretty cool. The 3030 has a built in programmable expression pedal that lets you do whammy effects with pitch shifter and all kinds of other real time effect changes. The whammy effect is not as good as the digitech whammy pedal on single notes (you can hear the pitch increments a little) but on big fat power chords it sounds very smooth and powerful. The wah effects are amazing also. The cyber wah (auto-wah) preset patch is just wicked. And the classic pedal wah sound is incredible. Its the first wah sound in a pedalboard effects processor that actually sounds very,very close to a vintage wah pedal. It just blew me away. You can also get some cool talk-box like effects with it. Oh yeah, there's also a special effects module that lets you get some real cool wacky sounds, that are great for industrial type music or for new age music. It also has some synth- bass effects that sound amazingly similar to some of the synth-bass patches on my Roland GR-1 guitar synth. Also another real cool feature is that both effect modules 1 and 2 can be arranged in either serial or parallel mode thus giving you a very different sound and tone flexibility. Oh, oh..The Tremelo effect? Incredible!!! Sounds very vintage. The "Surf" preset really nails that "Pulp Fiction" sound.
Ok, now for some gripes on the 3030. Well, to be blunt the intelligent harmonizer effect, well...sucks and is not very intelligent, but with the pitch-shifter effect I was able to get some very good intelligent sounding harmonies which was kinda strange. Also while the bypass mode sounds pretty good, it sounds just a tiny bit different then when my guitar is plugged right into my amp. The Cabinet Sim. effects (3 of them) sound pretty good but when going direct the distortion still sounds very fuzzy, and while you can still get some pretty useful and crunchy direct distortion sounds, it sounds much, much better when you mic your speaker.

Well, as I've only had it for a few weeks I can't say much about it. It is made of plastic so if you were really pounce on it, or a stage diver leaped off of it, it could get some serious damage. I take my trusty, battle-hardened and proven Digitech RP-1 with me as a backup in case the unthinkable happens.

I've dealt with Zoom before with another one of their products, but through my dealer, and they seemed pretty proffesional about everything.

I would defintaly buy it again! It and the Korg AX-30G are best buys for effects processors except the Zoom is cheaper and has a real time expression pedal (as well as an input for an additional expression pedal) while the Korg has a pressure sensitive pedal (though it does have a jack for an external expression pedal). Compared to older Zoom products like the 9000 series, it really smokes them. Compared to my digitech RP-1, it has more effects, but does not have any MIDI in or outs, and the reverb and delay sounds are'nt quite as pristine as the RP-1. It would be the ultimate effect processor if it was in a metal case, had a tube preamp, and if it had full MIDI programability and control. Overall though, it really has led me in new directions in my music. Now I can fade or pitch shift into massive cranial crunching distortion sounds. (with the benifit of a 1/2 stack, not quite as heavy on a combo amp) Plus I can do all kinds of cool industrial sounds when playing live and when recording. It's really rocks!

Great all around package for a number of effects. It has one pedal like the 2020 which can be used to control just about every parameter of the patch your playing; from reverb,distortion,wah,volume,1st effect, 2nd effect, etc. You have to use your hands to edit the patches, unless you just want to add or remove an effect while you play. The manual is fairly straight forward. I wish the manual came with actual settings for each of the factory presets. This would help in getting the sound just right, which took a little bit of tweaking. There are 28 user patches which you can edit and store and there are 28 factory presets which can only be edited and return to preset when unit is unpluged. No midi out like the 4040. Headphone jack, input, L(mono)/R outputs good for stereo effects.

I found the 3030 not to be too noisy. If your using a distortion in your chain of effects, you can use the ZNR(zoom noise reduction) setting from 1-5 to hush it up. Five or six of the factory settings I found unuseable, other than just goofing around by yourself. Perhaps you might like them, but they are just too far out for my tastes. You have to be careful if you are going to play within a band setting. It takes quite a bit of tweaking to get the sound to come through with everyone else playing. This is more so with the addition of every effect. Nearly half of the 8 types of distortions are for heavy-metal. The distortion is analog, which is a plus in my book. The best thing about this unit is the number of parameters you can adjust. You can place the eq before the distortion or after, adjust the level and amount of every effect.

I've only had it a short time, but without a problem. Our band plays 2-4 times a month so it will get alot of use. My performance does not depend on the effects of the 3030 since I use it subtly. If it did, I think I could still depend on it. Remember Murphy's Law however, I've even had a simple volume fail in the middle of a gig...

Never delt with them. No need so far.

I would buy it agian if I only had $300 to spend. If your willing to spend more, fork out the $800+ and buy a rack mount with floor pedal. I love the flexability of the 3030, you tweak every aspect of the patch. I wish the sound was a little fulller from the get go. Another button would be nice to switch the mode of the pedal while playing; wah for part of the song, volume for another, etc. It does help me create, since I can find "that" sound for a given mood, groove, or song.