SONICAKE IR Pedal Speaker Cabinet Simulator Impulse Response Loader Guitar Bass Effects Pedal

I like the aesthetic of the Sonicake pedals. I have four of their pedals currently, with a fifth one on order. This pedal I use for a simple room reverb and a slap-back analog tape echo. It can do a lot more, but I just needed something to just give my rig a little atmosphere. It looks great next to the 5th dimension that I use for chorus and the rude mouse pedal. I also have the vol-wah pedal, and I am waiting on the octaver. Edit: I now have several Sonicake pedals: The Sonic Ambience, 5th Dimension, Octaver, Vol-wah, Rude Mouse, Source Compressor, and Trio-Rider. The only one I don't love is the Octaver, but that isn't the pedal's fault; it is the type of pedal that it is. It isn't polyphonic, and it performs exactly as advertised. I love the Trio-Rider. I wanted a Klon-style pedal but never felt the need to pay a lot of money for one, and this hits exactly in the sweet spot of price for performance and features for me. I think it sounds great. The quality feels great, and the price, while a little bit more than some of the other pedals, was still very affordable for essentially three different Klon-style circuits. Edit: after buying the Trio Rider I bought the Fazy Sandwich. Disclaimer: I hate Fuzz pedals, but I feel like it’s the kind of effect everyone should have. The Fazy Sandwich is 3 different circuits. The Classic and Modern are nice and react well to controls. I was able to get sounds I enjoyed out of them. The “JF” big muff style sound I didn’t love but that is more because it is my least favorite style of fuzz.

$30 for a functional A/B pedal is great. This one does almost everything right and is a great value. It even does A/B switching in a mini-sized enclosure, which is impressive. My unit doesn't have any noticeable popping, and so far as I can tell doesn't degrade the signal. I was also happy to see that despite the description saying that A+B mode only works with Y as the input, mine did it just fine with Y as the output. In my case there was no change in volume when joining the signals, either (which can be a problem sometimes with stuff like this), which is awesome. So what could be better? I was a little surprised to see that the A+B mode basically disengaged the pedal button completely. Normally what you see in a 2-button footswitch is an A/B button and an A or B button. One of them normally switches between A and B. the other (A or B) will add or subtract the remaining channel. I had expected that Sonicake's unit would do something similar with the mode switch changed. Instead, it just ignores the pedal switch and everything is on all the time. I get why they did that, since with only one button available you couldn't get the full functionality easily. But I would have liked it better if I could get some form of A / A+B accessible via the footswitch in the second mode. The small size is both a strength and a minor drawback - with an enclosure this small there's no room for a battery. This isn't a huge deal since the pedal works without the battery (it only powers the LED), and many pedals of this kind don't have an LED anyway. Still, if I could choose between this and a version of the same thing in a bigger enclosure to hold a battery, I might have chosen the larger one. That's more feedback than criticism, but it's something to consider. I usually prefer batteries in pedals which only need them for the LED in order to avoid ground loop issues and save space on my board. Speaking of which, when I first plugged this pedal in, there was a significant ground hum introduced into my signal chain. I was a little puzzled by this since the power shouldn't even be connected to the sound. This probably means I was producing a ground loop that was showing up elsewhere. I ended up swapping out what was connecting to what (and what was daisy-chained) for other reasons before troubleshooting this and the issue happened to go away, so I didn't pay a lot of attention to it. It probably wasn't this pedal's fault anyway, but it is something to watch out for (again, this is why I might have preferred a battery for this). 5 stars for price and accomplishing what it set out to do. It might be a little unfair but if I could I'd take half a star for not handling the A+B issue differently. I guess their answer to the design issue at hand was valid but I think that part could be improved upon. But if you look at that as just a bonus feature anyway and look at this as an A/B pedal, this is a great unit and an outstanding value.

Simple and works great. For me in use, on a hissy high-gain application the fast setting engages the gate lowering the volume over about 1 second and the slow lowers it more gradually over several seconds. However YMMV depending on where you set your amp gains & volumes etc. It alters the tone very slightly but not enough for a busy noisy room to notice during a gig. The volume is also very slightly lowered compared to when the pedal is bypassed. Full chords and leads both sound good through it. (I've had some pedals where leads were fine but the complexity of chords just turned into mush) Recommended.

.This is well built and had good value for the price point. I play in a band so I'm a little more picky. The reverb and delay just did not produce the sound I was looking. It's a fine pedal. Just not for me. Might be right for you

So I've read through the bad reviews of this and every one of them seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what this does. Deducting stars because it doesn't have an on off switch (clearly shown), only takes 1024 size IRs (noted in the documentation), lack of a screen (you can see the pedal before purchasing), or because it needs an amp pedal in front (I mean, that's the whole point) is unfair. It's literally there for everyone to read before purchasing. I could as soon complain it didn't drive me to the store. It's cheap, solidly built for the price, comes with usable sounds for the price, no distortion at any volume level, super simple, and made of aluminum. You rotate a knob to cycle through the IRs. It's cheap because it doesn't have a screen. I use it with a RevivalDrive Compact Hot Rod. I've compared it to IRs on my computer and there's no difference. It does what it advertises. It takes a line level amp-like signal and applies a cab curve to it. That's it. Then it gets out of your way so you can rock. It's a blast to play. If I were to take a star away it would be for the site where you have to convert IRs. They have not updated their security certificate. That could be a deal breaker for security minded people. Otherwise it works as advertised.

For the price, this is fantastic. The reverbs are very usable and the delay choices are more than I usually need, so it covers all my uses: Pink Floyd, U2, Van Halen, etc. Seems pretty quiet on power supply chain. Common 9v barrel port. Soft-click on/off switch. When on, both effects are always on, but you take one out by just zeroing its mix level; so you can have reverb or delay, or both. A lot of uses for such an inexpensive pedal. Quality sound, good enough for stage or studio.

I am new to the IR world. I really have no interest in trying to load IR’s and there is no documentation on how to do this. It seems the people who know how to install and edit IR’s would not be buying an entry level unit like this. That said, I just needed a basic speaker cabinet simulator for church worship service. I usually plug in through an amp at home, but the church we attend has a “silent stage”. I needed inexpensive, and this seemed to be worth a shot. The first time I used used it, I plugged it into a standard 100ma slot on my power supply. It sounded awful. Later, I checked the documentation and saw it requires 200ma. I changed slots on my power supply and it sounded better. I found 2 cab sims, 4 & 7, seem to work okay. I played at church with it, straight out of my pedal board to the cabinet simulator, to a LoZ cable to the board. It seemed to work okay, but I really didn’t hear it through the mains. After looking at high end IR units, it seems they also use a preamp before the simulator, seemingly making it sound more like it’s going through an amplifier first… I don’t have one. I tried a couple pedals I have at home. First I tried an MXR Micro Amp between the out of the pedal board and the input of the Cab Sim. That didn’t seem to help much…. What did work?… to my surprise, a BYO optical compressor pedal I bought for $30 and built myself. That, with the sustain turned down low and the level set to unity helped smooth out the overdrive sounds, but still left the clean tones fairly bright. Not quite amp like, but usable. Yes there is a noticeable slight lag when listen to what you’re playing, but it’s minimal. If you just need something inexpensive and you are not expecting premium quality results, this could work, but you may need to do a little work too.

Great value for price, which is probably what most of you are weighing. Does something this cheap really work? Yes, in the case of the SONICAKE Noise Gate, it does work. If you're skeptical, just buy this pedal already. Likely you're looking for an intro-level noise gate but one that performs well and doesn't break the bank, and this is exactly that. Cuts all my idle guitar noise and still lets melodies ring and chugs djent. Can you get better? Sure, but that's only needed if you're really a guitar pedalboard enthusiast and love to spend hundreds of dollars on a simple noise gate. That is not necessary for most people. Enjoy!