I have bought many digital pedals over the years but they never stay on my board for long. At the moment I have a board with 15 analog pedals a Boss PS6, TC looper and tuner.
I need to take a smaller board to jam with friends, who mostly play covers. This board will have a Boss PS-6, 3 gain stages, Boss DM-2, Boss HF-2, Ditto+, Polytune mini and now the BOSS MD-200.
I like flanger after delay that's why the Boss HF-2 is on this board. As you can see I like Boss so the MD-200 was the obvious first choice to try a digital multi mod.
The sounds of all the effects are more than good enough for jamming with friends and/or playing live. In the studio I will stick to analog effects, but if I had not collected so many analog pedals over the years, I would be happy to use the MD-200 in that situation too.
I really like all the effects they do not sound overly digital. They are not cold or lifeless.
The flanger mode I can get really close to my old 80's Boss HF-2 but I will keep the HF-2 on the board for the reason stated above as I will be using the loop for my drives to place before or after a preset. On the big board I use a Fulltone Supa-trem 2, I also have a Boss TR-2 and the tremolo mode on the MD-200 can simulate both of those pedal nicely.
This review is going to be long enough so I won't compare all the modes with my analog pedals so suffice to say I think the Phaser's, Uni-vibe, Vibrato, Rotary, Chorus and CE-1 are all excellent.
The overtone and slicer are a super nice additions, they're effects I would only have had access to in plugins so to have them included is awesome. The Autowah for me personally is so so. I would have much preferred an envelope filter or even better a cocked wah, but you can do the funky 70's cop chase/porn music wah thing so it's not completely useless.
The only thing I truly do not like about the pedal is the design format. The sloped front with the super small on/off and preset/tempo switches are not so good for putting on the back row of a board and given the height of the pedal and the knobs it is not great for putting on the front of the board. It is the sole reason it took me two years to order this pedal, and given the circumstance of wanting a minimalistic board, I would still be holding off waiting for Boss to redesign the 200 series.
However if you raise the pedal up with some timber (or whatever) to give it some extra height when stepping over the pedals in front, it is ok. I am taking about slanted boards too. It still needs to be raised up.
Boss could easily keep the design and overcome this draw back by putting large on/off switches. Look at Thorpyfx pedals as an example. Similar design but excellent quality and size switches which make them easy to put anywhere on the pedal board.
At the end of the day the sound quality and number of effects. The ease of use and build quality. More than make up for what I perceive to be a design flaw. I'm not even going to take marks off it for that as it can be worked around. But Boss really should at the very least start adding larger switches. I will most likely make this mod myself when the warranty runs out.
Until I get the midi set up. The four effects that are going into the presets slots are. The CE-1, Classic Phaser, Tremolo and Rotary. I will keep the manual slot set to the Slicer.
