IK Multimedia TONEX Pedal: Stereo multi-effects guitar and bass pedal with 150 Presets, 15 Pre/Post FX, Tuner, Tap Tempo, Headphone Out, Software Player and Editor

Virtual IR amps have finally gotten good enough to use in public performance/studio/practice, sound good, and be cheap enough for the gigging musician. That said, if you are an old-school knob-turning guitarist, it'll take you a while to master this technology. I REALLY like the flexibility of the different effects, amp profiles, MIDI/expression-pedal switching; being able to run with an amp that won't 'break your back' carting it around, and won't 'break the bank.' And even be able to run through the PA.Be advised, you'll need to understand mixing, gain-staging, etc to 'capture' your favorite amp profile... but it's 'doable'.I'm impressed.-Therm, of thermionic-sound

Love it so far. I wanted something compact to just sit down and quickly play and this is exactly it. Just plug in and play with headphones or speakers. You can also have it really easy or get reallllly technical with it as there's a lot of advanced parameters to change. There's quite a learning curve if you go that route, but if you just wanna sit down and have a good ole jammy shred piece then this is it. Don't expect fractal axe fx tones, but for what it is you can get some really amazing sound for guitar or bass. Presets are just fine and easily adjustable. Very easy to use and setup. My only gripe is that it doesn't have a power switch which seems to be a lot of people's issues. But still it's fine.

Pros: It's a versatile unit, with many vintage and modern cab tones to explore and download from the cloud. From the demos on the internet, it doesn't sound as good as a Quad cortex or Kemper, but for the price, it is a great deal and much lighter. I use it with a Line 6 Stomp HX for wet effects and a few overdrive/distortion analog pedals, and it works just fine.The cons are that you might need some time to dial in the different amps, the pedal's controls aren't very intuitive, and the PC/Mac software is kind of clunky. Still, it's worth the 5 stars because of the endless possibilities.

Topline: Incredible variety, quality, and accuracy at your fingertips for a very fair price. However, the UI/UX is lacking, and it's incredibly noisy.PROS:- IK's Tonex ecosystem has thousands of amp and cab models for you to try- The tones sound *really* good, and are very accurate to their real-world amp counterparts.- The price is great.- Three presets per bank is nice, making this very usable in a live scenario especially if you hook it up via MIDI for auto-patch switching.- the included reverb/compressor/noise gates are very usable.CONS:- The UI/UX on the desktop app is really bad. In order to load an IR or new amp model onto the unit (should be one of the simplest actions), you have to create a preset that contains the amps/cabs you want and drag it onto the pedal in the "librarian" view in the app. you CANNOT simply drag and drop cabs and amp models you want onto the pedal's storage and then go tweak it, you MUST create a preset that contains all the models you want. Want to try a new amp model with 12 new cabs? You need to create 12 separate presets, sorry.- The workflow on the unit itself is terrible. Editing parameters is a real pain and menu diving is really clunky. Would be nice if it had a screen and encoder knobs, but I get that they want to keep cost down. This is the price you pay for that.- EXTREMELY NOISY! I don't know why nobody talks about this, but SO many of the amp models are very, very noisy. If you have a single coil guitar this thing can be a real challenge to work with. Even many clean amp tones are super noisy. You will need to make very liberal use of the noise gate. I suppose this is accurate to the "Real amp" experience, but many other digital modelers don't really have this problem, and Tonex is fundamentally a digital amp modeler.

I bought this with 25% discount and came with both XTONE MAX and Amplitube, it sounds incredible and great value for price!

it just works. I can have any amp I want and bass amps as well. I had a 5150 Stealth and with this compared they both sound completely the same to me and works great with pedals. Sold the EVH 5150 head and kept this modeler and if I knew this would be this good I wouldve got this a long time ago.

The Tonex is similar to Kemper in that it consists of amp captures instead of amp modeling. It's like having a digital version of any amp you wants but quality depends on the quality of the captures. I played it through a power amp and real cab. I found this way worked best when I played captures that only captured an amp's preamp. I thought it sounded great for the price but man it was a pain to use. The hardware interface seems very outdated and the software is confusing. I watched a few YouTube videos to get the hang of it but still hated the way it was laid out. I also tried to capture my real amps which was difficult and I had mixed success. I ended up selling it after a few months and got something else.

Solid build, software a little learning curve but sound and flexibility is HUGE!