Electro Harmonix Key9 | Review 

I agree! Thanks for the great demo.

Thanks for the info!

It uses effectology and modelling. If you look at what Bill Ruppert does in his effectology series, it's basically that. The nines are basically multi effect units, almost like a multitude of pedals in one, that shape the tone of your axe in such a way that it ends up sounding like an organ, e piano, mellotron, bass, synth, string section etc. Depending on the model. Each pedal essentially has a multitude of built on effects that shape the tone to sound like something else, and changing the parameters on the pedals changes up the effects or the parameters of the effects. Back in the day, guitarists would use and experiment with different pedals in the studio and live in combinations to achieve the craziest effects. Some even went further and incorporated technique, such as E - bowing or slides or others, and a few even full-on bowed their guitars with literal violin bows (eg. Jimmy Page). While these crazy feats were often super experimental, many people also tried to jump on the bandwagon and try it themselves (even now, there's plenty of videos on YT of people achieving x sound with a bunch of pedals and doing tutorials on how to do so). The only problem is that unlike Jimmy Page or other famous guitarists, most people don't have a load of space and money and time to mess around dialling tones on 20 something pedals/rackmount units. So EHX decided that they'll help out and make pedals that allow guitarists to emulate different sounds of instruments with just one pedal, sparing the need for rackmount units or a crap ton of pedals. MIDI does achieve this, too, but there are fundamental problems with guitar to MIDI that I personally experience too as an FTP user. The elephant in the room is that you will have to somehow attach an extra pickup to your guitar, which isn't easy. But also, MIDI takes away organic sounds from your tone as you're essentially just becoming a keyboardist using your guitar as a keyboard, so certain guitar techniques will be difficult. Also, MIDI is very sensitive and will often be mistrigger, especially if you are, like me, a fast punk/metal player, which really causes MIDI to f up and barf out a crap ton of mistriggers and other poor sounding noises that essentially look like one has gone and slammed their face into a MIDI keyboard. There's also the whole process off taking the acoustic signal of the strings into the pickup and sending each strings output to a decoder, which deciphers what you played, turns it to MIDI and then sends that into whatever you want to control. This often causes latency, especially with lower notes. The nines, on the other hand, have no latency and no triggering (and therefore, no MIS triggering) and no guitar to MIDI translation. They literally just use your guitar -> multiple effects in on pedal -> amp (or whatever else you want after the pedal).

While you can certainly strum on these petals, just like with bending notes, the attack doesn't give as convincing a sound as if you play finger style. If you really want it to sound like another instrument then you have to adjust your playing style a bit.

For flat picking it seems to work fine

How would you strum a piano? You'd have to open it up and get inside it.

True. That's got me thinking.

It's more responsive with higher output pickups. I had to raise the pickup height on a couple of my teles that have low output pickups to get the optimal response from it. At first I thought it was defective until I did that.

use the bridge pickup and stay away from the dusty end of the fretboard as the sounds are best below the 10th fret (in my humble opinion) - as the guy above says, read the manual.

a compressor really helps and high output pickups.

@@greysnoutcompressor before or after the key9?

What do u mean

@@terryb6802 The selector for sound type does not give the sound you put it on , it goes random , sometime changes , or doesn't change , it's unreliable . Pedals in this pricerange should work properly .