Recording - July 2012 - 18

Zoom G3 and G5

patches, A0 through J9, with a large display and up/down selectors (you can also use knobs to move around by bank or preset). The G5 has 297 patches organized into 99 banks of three patches each; ideally you’d organize your patches into groups of three per song, which can be called up instantly with a single touch of a footswitch. The G5 also features a fifth footswitch for a separate effect called the Tube Booster. This is an all-analog 12AX7 vacuum tube amplification stage with simple Gain and Tone knobs that can be added to any patch at will. It comes after the D/A converter and is not part of the digital effects chain, so its on/off state is not remembered as part of a patch, nor can it be added to audio sent to USB. The rear panels of the two devices are almost identical. There’s a Hi-Z (1 Megohm) 1 /4" input for your guitar, with an Active/Passive switch; use Passive if you’re feeding your guitar directly into the unit, Active if your guitar has active electronics or if you have another effects box ahead of it in the chain. There’s a mono XLR Balanced Out with two switches—one for ground lift, the other for Pre or Post effects output. The Left and Right 1/4" line-level outputs on the G3 are wired so that depending on which jacks are plugged in and whether you use mono or TRS stereo plugs, you can get mono output, separate Left and Right outs, or a stereo output for headphones. (The G5 has a separate headphone jack.) A 1/4" Control In jack lets you add a Zoom volume pedal or footswitch. Then there’s a jack for the wallwart power supply, power switch, and USB port. The G3 can run on four AA batteries if desired; the G5 requires AC power because of its tube circuit. Whew! That’s a lot of mechanics. Now for the fun part—playing with the sounds. The effects Zoom has come a long way since its 1990s digital processors; while it still retains a variety of distortions, overdrives, and time/modulation effects with its own distinct stamp, its amp and cabinet emulations have been refined to a high level of quality. You’ll find emulations of amps and stomp boxes by many famous makers—they’re given names and LCD graphics that hint at their origins, but the manual’s effects list actually namechecks all of the source devices being modeled if you’re curious.
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RECORDING JULY 2012

Whenever we talk about modeled effects or amps, the question of “accuracy” vs. “quality” comes up, and people line up on both sides of the line for a punch-out. For practical reasons I tend to side with the “quality” folks. In my experience, someone who insists on having a particular amp’s sound exactly right won’t use a digital effects processor at all, but will buy or rent the amp in question. The same goes for stomp boxes; my esteemed colleague Fernando Curiel, Editor of our Spanish-language sister publication Músico Pro and an ace session guitarist, owns (at my last count) five different Ibanez Tube Screamers of various vintages and degrees of modification! When asked why, he would say, “They all sound different to me, and one can’t really replace another. I do use and like digital effects, but for this particular sound I want the real thing.”

It’s hard to argue with that; someone who relishes that level of purism for a particular sound isn’t going to be a customer for the emulations in the G3 or G5. But if we shift our focus to sound quality, then the question we ask changes to, “Does this emulation work well at giving me a sound that I can play and find inspiring?” And to my ears, the G3 and G5 excel in that department. These are great-sounding effects, and if you’re familiar enough with what the original is supposed to sound like and how it works, you won’t be disappointed with the range of control and tone you get from the Zoom versions... turning a particular control causes the sonic change you’d expect and hope for, and gives satisfying results. Taking a wider view, fewer than half of the effects are specific emulations at all; the rest are Zoom’s own takes on familiar effects, and many of them are extraordinarily

effective. There’s a particular “Zoom sound” for distortion that some guitarists really love, and the G3 and G5 provide many variations on that tone with different frequency emphasis and dynamic response. The dynamics control effects are smooth and musical, the time and modulation effects offer dozens of variations from basic chorus and delay to dual phase shifting, dynamically based ducking delays, and much more. This is a very deep and broad toolbox for creating cool tones, whether clean or distorted, and the presets cover a wide range of possibilities and serve as inspirations to tweak and build your own patches. The G3 will please a lot of guitarists just as it is, but effects fans who want to go completely over the top will dig the extras in the G5. There’s an autopanner, rotary speaker simulator, exciter, new amp models, and much more, and that’s before you even get to the twenty new Z-Pedal effects. Simultaneous echo time and feedback control, tremolo rate and depth, filter cutoff and resonance, flanger depth and LFO rate, are all available from the Z-Pedal. A variety of special effects programs make the most of effects modules not available in the G3. Combination effects let you add different sounds with left/right movement, such as tremolo to the left vs. phaser to the right. There’s even a special Custom effect that lets you use the Z-Pedal to control any other effect in the chain. And then there’s the Tube Booster, which provides a very distinctive heavy tube thickness to your sound, with up to 16 dB of gain boost. Sometimes it’s just what a patch needs to make it sit well in a mix and breathe with a bit of analog life; sometimes it’s not needed for a particular sound and is easily bypassed—which you couldn’t do on the older tube-enhanced Zoom pedals. Tube sound is very subjective, and I am not sure anyone would buy the G5 just for its tube stage, but it’s a nice adjunct to a powerful processor and is great to have when it’s appropriate. Extras The G3 and G5 include a Rhythm generator with 41 looped sounds, mostly in 4/4 but with a few in 3/4 and one in 5/4. They’re cleanly sampled and goodsounding, suitable for practice use or for feeding into the Looper for beat-based fun and games. The Looper has a basic feature set that makes use of the existing stomp buttons for playback, recording, and overdub; there’s up to 40 (G3) or 60 (G5) seconds of record time (half that if you have enabled the Undo function), and a variety of settings that let you customize the Looper’s behavior to your own preferences, e.g. whether stopping the Looper kills audio

Recording - July 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - July 2012