tc electronic Plethora X3

The displays on the pedal are beautiful and the UI is well designed. Editing patches is quick and intuitive. The build is very sturdy and has plenty of good knobs. Sadly, that's all that I really liked about it.

I didn't like most of the initial patches. When trying to set up my own, I ended up not really liking the sound of the reverb. As the most basic effect I was probably going to use on absolutely everything, that's a big negative. (Clearly, this is 100% subjective.)

The big selling point of the Plethora is the availability of TonePrints which would allow you to go very much in-depth with your patches - many effect options are not available from the pedal itself. I was hoping to maybe create better sounds with the TonePrint editor, but the software turned out to be, let's say, not that great.

TonePrint Editor feels simultaneously oversimplified and overwhelmingly complex. Finding out whether you're connected and where to start editing is very confusing and underdocumented. Creating empty patches is impossible - you always have to start with a copy of an existing patch. When you finally get to the right place, the UI is basically just dozens of dials staring at you without any clear hierarchy or guidance.

This just wasn't an environment I wanted to spend a lot of time in, designing my patches - so I decided to send the pedal back. If you're just planning to work with the features from the pedal itself without software, and like the tone of the effects, this could very well be for you as the pedal looks and handles beautifully. But it definitely wasn't for me.

There are one or two small conceptual leaps that are necessary to get over but once you do, this pedal makes a lot of sense. Basically it is 3 pedals in a box. 3 of any pedal from the TC lineup. Any 3, so it can be 3 noise-gates, if that's what you want. Each pedal is like a single 'mode' from one of the stand-alone pedals, so you could have a Flashback tape delay and a Flashback reverse-delay on the same board, which can be activated independently as if they are standalone pedals. Once you get your head around this concept, you can master most of the thing without ever looking at a USB port.

When you do get round to the USB (or Bluetooth) connectivity, your world of possibility will expand exponentially. Here is where you can tweak pedal configurations, download printouts, modify toneprints, change knob assignments, create midi mappings... so much possibility.

Even is you just use it as a box of pedals and never connect to a computer it is amazing value, but if you go the whole way into the Toneprint world... it becomes an amazingly flexible and unique tone shaper.