Review: DigiTech iStomp and TC Electronic TonePrint

All guitarists* suffer from the same disease: pedal lust.

In our quest to improve our tone, we voraciously hoard stompboxes – fetching little things with pretty lights that we mash with our shoes, adding different colors to our instrument's raw signal as we switch them on and off.

The best pedals are pricey ($200 or $300 each), and they're single-serving devices that only make one sound. For the cost of one pedal, you could just buy a multi-effects unit – a shoe-box-sized rhombus with an array of switches that can add up to a dozen effects at once.

I tried multi-effects units like the Line 6 M9 and the Boss GT-10, and even the massive DigiTech iPB-10 pedalboard, which uses the processing power of your iPad to manipulate the guitar's sound. But I wasn't satisfied. The boxes sound good enough, but they're bulky, clumsy, and a little over-the-top. More importantly, I missed the tactile, granular control afforded by twisting the knobs on individual pedals.

I found two simpler solutions: DigiTech's iStomp pedal, and the TonePrint line of effects from TC Electronic. They look like regular guitar effect pedals. But connect them to a computer or an iOS device and they become customizable. You can download sounds and burn them onto a firmware chip inside the stompbox, altering the tone, tweaking the behavior of the controls, or, in the case of the iStomp, changing it into a completely different pedal altogether.

DigiTech's iStomp and the TonePrint line of pedals from TC Electronic look like regular guitar effect pedals. But connect them to a computer or an iOS device and they become customizable.TC Electronic's TonePrint is the more conservative of the two. The Danish company makes several different TonePrint pedals – there's a chorus, a flanger, a vibrato effect and a delay pedal. I tested the Corona Chorus and the Vortex Flanger. Both are excellent pedals to begin with, and they sell for the modest price of around $130 each.

The Corona Chorus, for example, is a great pedal in its default state, offering both a 1980's-sounding SCF chorus and a tri-chorus mode that overlays three chorus effects on top of one another (listen to TC's sound samples).

But flip a little switch on the face of the pedal, and you can access a third voice: whatever TonePrint setting you've downloaded.

Adding a TonePrint preset to the pedal is dead easy. You install a simple updater app (Mac and Windows) and attach the pedal to your computer via a USB cable. Then, go to the TC Electronics website and browse the signature settings developed by professional recording artists and by the engineers at TC Electronic. Download the TonePrint you want (each pedal holds only one at a time) and load it onto the pedal.

The most common tweaks add things like high-end filters, reverse effects, or recreations of bygone classics. On the chorus pedal, I found the TonePrints built to emulate vintage effects (like the Boss CE-2) to be the most appealing, as well as the settings by Syu, Dann Huff and Orianthi. Many of the other artist's selections were too digital-sounding or extreme for my tastes. Plus, maybe I'm just old, but who are these guys? I had to search Wikipedia to uncover the pedigree of Bumblefoot ("Guns N' Roses"), Munky (dude from Korn) and Uwe Hassbecker (uhh...). Any chance we can get David Gilmour, Daniel Ash or Gene Ween to throw us a bone here?

There are certainly enough sounds on offer – dozens for each pedal in the line – to satisfy every taste. As I mentioned, I especially liked TC's in-house builds, or the subtler, vintage treatments. Dann Huff's setting sounded great on a finger-picked guitar, and Orianthi's setting did wonderful things to my Fender Rhodes piano.

No matter what I loaded onto the Corona Chorus, it was still a chorus pedal. But what about a pedal that can turn into anything?

That's the special sauce inside the DigiTech iStomp ($150). It's a slim gunmetal enclosure (too slim for a battery, so the power adapter is mandatory) with four unlabeled knobs. It comes with a cable that connects the box to your iOS device. Once you download DigiTech's free StompShop app, you can browse the various effects, called "e-pedals," and download them for between $1 and $10 each. Your in-app purchases are stored within the app on your iOS device, so to load up the pedal, you just connect your iPhone/iPad and choose the e-pedal you want to imprint into the hardware. Voila – in about 60 seconds, you can change a filthy fuzz pedal into a rotating speaker pedal, a delay/looper pedal, or whatever.

When the guts of your pedal change, the knobs on the face don't control the same parameters anymore. It gets a little confusing when your "fuzz" knob suddenly becomes a "rotation speed" knob, so DigiTech includes removable labels for each effect, plus a few blanks you can use to mark your favorite knob positions.

I tried out most of the 25 or so e-pedals on offer, thanks to the feature that lets you test anything in the store for five minutes. I also purchased a few and tried them for longer periods. The sounds themselves are of varying quality. Just like with the TonePrint selections, I found the DigiTech e-pedals that mimic the vintage effects (the Small Stone phaser, Tube Screamer distortion and the classic Fuzz Face) to be the best. The more extreme or ambitious effects were too harsh and digital-sounding, but the subtler creations sounded really nice.

For the tone generation, DigiTech is using the same technology found in its iPad-powered iPB-10 pedalboard. So if you're familiar with the iPB-10, you'll recognize the same smells here.

I can see the iStomp being an excellent choice for an effect that you only need for one song. Why spend the same money on a pedal that only does one thing when you can get a pedal that can easily be wiped and rebirthed as something entirely different at a later date? It's not going to replace anything in my starting line-up of beloved, boutique effects. But for the random sounds, or when I'm asked to play a one-off gig, the iStomp fits perfectly.

* Not all guitarists, only those who believe more pedals, and not focused practice, will improve your playing.