Zoom 506 Bass Effects

prety ease. no problem

here are the big problems. those sounds are so artificial people may think you are a bass player from jupiter. the reverbs and halls are nothing but cra**. the HISS WILL DRIVE YOU CRAZY. the only useable thing is the baypass, but the hiss anyway........... or the tuner.
THIS IS a LITTLE BIT OF ADVICE: DO NOT use it in thre pre mode of your amp. always use it in the post mode, or chain efgfects. inh pre mode is HORRIBLE. i use a EB music/ stingray. trough a gk head and ampeg cab (classic). man, to be honest in pre mode, with this rig is like putting a geo metro motor into a ferrari. DO NOT USE IT IN PRE MODE. in post would work

as far ok.

never dealt with them.

ok. back in the 1998 the unit cost if i am not wrong $200 bucks. now they go for $39. ??why? well answer is at you own nose. i bought mine for $100. to be honest i think $39 is the fair price. sound are nothing but $20 bucks unit. tuner ok. if you tend to be pro STAY AWAY for this and maybe get a comp/limiter pedal. best invest.

it takes quite a bit of getting use to. but once you got the hang of it. adjusting sounds is `easy' enough.

I agree, out of the box, it sounds a bit digital, but you can, and MUST taylor it to your own needs and sound. and yes there IS hiss in it, but with fine tweaking, it can be overcome for most sounds

My first zoom, which was for electric guitar,which I bought used. died, but I dont know how it was treated and how old it was. I've had this one for a couple of years, and I'm pretty happy with it, now that I've changed every patch in it. no problems so far

haven't dealt with them

i have a listing of every factory patch setting on it, so if i want to recall a factory setting, I know what they are. and I changed every patch so each bank has its own `character'.and made charts showing every setting on every patch. A-bank for accoustic, B-Bank for Bass, C-Bank for chord & chorus, D-bank for distortions, E-bank for Echoes, F-bank for flange and Phase, and G-bank is for temporary use. I load whatever patch I want into the G bank and can switch back and forth between them on the fly a lot easier. I highly reccomend doing this, and ease of use goes' up to a 9 out of 10. it takes a while to program it this way, but the resluts are well worth it. now I can find the exact sound I want very easily, and it can be used with my electric/accoustic as well. the original factory set up has no logic to it. want my patch set-up list ? e-mail me at curbie1150@yahoo.com.

It seems pretty easy to use. I did some patch editing today, as I never like factory settings. It sounded okay, but I'll probably have to tweak it a bit more.

Running through a Behringer 120, i bypassed the amp's preamp stage to get good sound. Apparently, I was right when I thought I got ripped off when I bought my amp. Also, I bought the older generation, not the 506II, and it seems the older ones sound better.

When I bought it, I was told that it kept shutting off and I had to hit a pedal to turn it back on. But I immediately knew the problem (Bad switch in the input jack) and had the equipment and parts to fix it. I replaced them with jacks that bolt onto the case. But hey, for $40 used, and knowing what the problem was, it wasn't too big of a risk.

Never called, but they're probably not very helpful anyways.

Well, It's probably not the best thing I bought, but it does what I need it to do. I play a variety of stuff, from classic rock, pop-punk, a little rap, and some blues.

Fiarly simple to get to know. The main problem is pressing both the pedals to get it to bypass.

I had an active Hohner Jack going to this to a Peavey Firebass but I haven't used it in ages. Mainly due to the noise. You can get some great sounds out of it, I was particularly fond of the octaver which you can sweep if used in congunction with a volume/wah pedal.
The wah itself was fairly rubbish, more of a high/low switch than any wah I've ever heard.
I don't use it any more because it is just too noisy, even on the bypass.

It is plastic but I've never had a problem with it. I used it for about 4 years without any problems.

Never had call to find out

Great for beginners, but try to pick one up second hand.

I'm currently looking for seperate effects but without having played with this I wouldn't know what to look for. Having read one of the reviews here I'm going to stick it into the effects loop off my amp which will let me properly bypass it. This will let me get some of the off the wall sounds without having to deal with the noise.

It has served me well but it's time to move on.

It's very easy to use if in a song you only use a couple of effects and when you program it, you think in your songs.

I use a Warwick Fortress One and a Patrick Eggle Milan V, a level art tube compresor and Trace Elliot BXL 130
If you're locking for a distortion, this it is not the multi-effect that you need, if you wants to do chips, this it is the suitable instrument.
I can't get any good warm distortion (like audioslave or Billy Shehan, in the other hand, they uses a expensives preamps...)

- Don't use batteries
- Be carefully with the connection of the a/c adapter if you step on it, you will have it to reconstruct
- Never failed me
- Be carefully with the small buttons of the side

I play rock untill 10 years ago, if somebody stile it never I bought again the same.
But if you don't have money, you can use the compresor, the amp simulator and you can connect the earpieces to play with batteries in the mountain ;).

The unit is easy to use,but navagation is a little cumbersome.

The unit has decent sound quality. The units standard effects are weak, but with some time and experimenting you can get some decent sounds.
The bad thing is that the unit is noisy, I wish it was cleaner.
Some people say that it is junk, but it is usable if you take time and make good paramater adjustments.

It is made of plastic, but it does seem to hold up well.

I have never had to contact them. Unlike the 505 I have not found any sites with patches available. The 505 had many uses post some interesting patches to use.

Overall it is a good unit for a beginner or some live use, I don't think it would be a good thing to use to record with. If you need a unit for live effects and could get it for $20 it would be pretty well worth it. If you want effects to record with I would get a Boss or pod.

Easy to use, simple. No problem here.

Very very poor....if you have a good bass, it will destroy your sound with hiss and artificial sounds....

Don't worry about it, you will give up before it cracks.

Who cares?

Very poor. Bass is very different than guitars...if you don't have the best equipment, you'd better bypass it. A good bass, amp and cables are essencial...but unless you're already playing pretty good and want to record things, the dream of improving your sound is very frustrating by bying such things....if so, save your money for some bass classes will improve it faster!

Pretty easy to use, switching through the patches takes a minute, but it's pretty easy to do (up or down the bank, not much else to it).

Editing patches is somewhat annoying and takes getting used to. Following the blinking lights is confusing at first.

I used this mostly with a Yamaha BBN5 running through a Yorkville 200B and it was hard to find good settings with it. It's a decent first multi-effect to get your toes wet for playing bass with effects; one or two of the stock patches are ok.

Overall, the effects this thing makes are pretty weak and nothing stands out as being particularily good.

I haven't had any reliability issues with it while I owned it and I bought it used.
Not something you'd want to gig with; well, unless you like your bass to sound like ass that is.

n/a

I had this pedal for about 4 years, mostly using it for the tuner feature, occasionally playing with the patches. It can be fun to experiment with, but overall, the sound you get isn't going to be very good.

It's pretty easy to figure out. It grows on you. The interface does suck compared to digitech's though I miss the knobs 8(

I'm not a bass player. I just needed a couple of the effects/features that were on this and I could get it really cheap.

For those interested:
I play a Epiphone Flying V w/Duncan Distortion in the bridge
into-> Rocktron Gainiac Tube Preamp
into-> Zoom 506
into-> Peavey Deltafex stereo processor
into-> Technics 500watt Stereo Receiver (For the Power amp)
into-> Home built 4x10 cabinet w/ Eminence speakers


I bought this primarily because I needed amp simulation (My stereo receiver kicks out a lot of sound but it has zero tone shaping). I considered getting digitech rp50 or rp100 but I went with the z506 because I found it for 20 bucks on ebay...plus I used several digitechs for years and have come to this conclusion...Zooms simply have way better ADA conversion.

I am very impressed with how this little pedal worked out.
First, I like how the amp simulation has divided the preamp and amp simulators to different parts of the signal chain therefore giving me the chance to disable preamp simulation when I don't need it. I like using some of the clean preamps on here to help shape my lead tone but for heavy gut crunchin' riffs it sound better to have the preamps disabled.

I think the flanger is pretty cool

The EQ seems to be effective but it takes so long to find out exactly what I want that I hate to mess with it.

reverbs are great, delay is okay...

I'm a little nervous here...
I bought it used so I don't know how much abuse it's taken...
Right now the battery leads are open and taped to the battery, I hope to fix this soon LoL. There is no battery cover so If I move it, it can shut off and I have to retape it. I guess I can't fairly rate this category since I didn't buy it new....

Great for what I bought it for.
Excellent tone shaping ability for such a low-class piece of equipment.
I used to play digitech rp300 and I can say that the sound is overall much clearer on the zoom. It sounds more like analogue.

I can't speak one way or another for the fuzz' and distortions on the 506 because I only use the clean amp simulations. I use my tube preamp for the distortion.

There's some noise in it...

All in all, it's a tight little package that has everything I need to complete my guitar effects.

Yo tambien voy a dar mis opiniones y calificaciones en castellano! para que lea algun compa?ero latinoamericano o algun compatriota Argentino. A ver empezamos con lo facil o dificil que puede ser usar esta pedalera. Es muuy facil de usar, esta muy bien configurada y armada, salvo algunas opciones que se quieran realizar en donde hay que mantener teclas apretadas por mas de 2 segundos ...pero esta muy bien, ademas los manuales de instrucciones estan bien explicitos y no hay forma de que uno no le agarre la vuelta a la cosa.

Yo estoy usando en este momento un amp Fender BXR, un Fender Jazz Bass Standard y un Gibson EB-3 de 1967. Yo compre esta pedalera sobre todo para poder usar mi Gibson, ya que buscaba un sonido tipo Jack Bruce (CREAM)y la verdad es que quede muy complacido ya que buscaba un pizca de distorcion y me parecio mas adecuado esta pedalera que un Boss Overdrive Bass que es una distorcion mas metalica, algunos efectos son muy "plasticos" por lo que no son muy buenos, para el Jazz Bass he usado efectos como el chorus, auto-wha...y estan bien..no son gran cosa pero estan bien. Haciendo un promedio la pedalera queda aprobada, es una pedalera no profesional que no sirve para estudio por lo ruidosa que puede llegar a ser, pero esta excelente para usar en vivo.

Si!, es bastante confiable, nunca tuve problemas. Aunque no dependo de ella, el sonido lo doy yo con mis dedos no ella.

ni idea...nunca llame a nadie por reparaciones porque no las necesite.

Para el estilo de musica que hago, que es Blues-Rock esta muuy bien!.He tenido 2 de estas pedaleras y si llegara a perder esta pedalera no dudaria en comprarme otra porque por la calidad-precio es muuuy buena!!!. Siempre tiene sus pros y contras porque cada uno tiene su sonido y resulta dificil adaptarla a "su sonido" pero siempre puede contrarrestarla si se le pone paciencia, y teniendo en cuenta la relacion calidad-precio. Es una pedalera confiable y de buen sonido.