EQ’s Which One?

[RustyAxe]

I'm happy with my Empress. I bought mostly to be able to tame my Guild B50 acoustic bass guitar, which it did quite well. Works great for acoustic guitar (and just about anything else you run through it). Only drawback is the 18VDC power requirement, which requires me to use the Empress AC/DC supply.

[6L6]

BOSS GE-7 has worked great for me for over 30 years.

[lkingston]

I LOVE my Tech 21 Q\Strip. It basically gives you the same level of EQ as a great analog console. There is no separate Q adjustment, but like some of the great vintage consoles, the Q gradually increases with increasing amounts of cut or boost, so in actual practice, it is very easy to dial out problem frequencies. There is a high pass filter, a gentle low pass filter, and two sweepable mids!

It is designed to saturate very subtly and beautifully with large frequency boosts. This mimics the sound of vintage analog consoles. I especially like this on the bass frequencies as I do a lot of fingerstyle thumb bass lines. It just sounds beautiful!

It draws very little current, is phantom powerable, and if you are using a battery, sounds great even when the power LED is just barely lit (so you’ll never be surprised by a dead battery).

The is lots of good clean gain. You would have no problem using it on a low output passive pickup without the Red Eye if you wanted. I doubt you would even miss it.

Construction is very solid. The buffer (unlike Boss pedals) is completely transparent. The only coloration of the sound is what you dial in.

[Spook]

Originally Posted by RustyAxe

I'm happy with my Empress. I bought mostly to be able to tame my Guild B50 acoustic bass guitar, which it did quite well. Works great for acoustic guitar (and just about anything else you run through it). Only drawback is the 18VDC power requirement, which requires me to use the Empress AC/DC supply.

If the provided power supply is 18V I can certainly see how you could get that impression. However, you can run 9V - 18V negative tip. Earlier pedals may require setting an internal dip switch. According to Impress overhead isn't impacted regardless of voltage and it still pulls under 100mA.

https://support.empresseffects.com/s...of-the-paraeq-

[Shredmaster007]

I have the Align EQ and Q-strip that I go back and forth with my Baggs M80 / J45. The Align is really clean and transparent but doesn't quite let me dial out the treble 'zing' that I get from the M80. The Q-strip lets me tame the highs but definitely has a more saturated sound than the Align (which is kinda nice if your guitar is thin!) They're both really nice pedals and I'm going to keep them.

I also had an MXR 6 band silver box that was really clean which I ran after my Red Eye and K&K setup, along with a Wampler Ego compressor.

I finally got tired of fussing with EQ and pickups and bought a Takamine P5DC with the cool tube preamp. It sounds better all around plugged in, with *zero* effort.