 Hello, Oscillator Sync here. This is the Zoom Multi-Stomp MS-70 CDR chorus delay and reverb. It is a multi-effects pedal that gives you access to lots of different modulation delay and reverb sounds in one package. It is relatively inexpensive and for the money it sounds pretty good, so for that reason it's very very popular. Given that it provides access to so many different effects type it does lead you to wonder perhaps is it a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. So a number of months ago I did a shootout video where I compared it to this the Digitech Palaro which is a dedicated reverb pedal. I will put a link in the description of this video if you want to take a look at that video but the sort of general conclusion that I came to at the end was that if you want sort of good basic reverb sounds that always sound good. It's almost impossible to make it sound bad. The Palaro kind of beats the Zoom but the flexibility of the Zoom and the access to the more weird effects certainly does make a compelling argument for the Zoom if that is more interesting to you. But that of course was just looking at reverb sounds so today I would like to compare the Zoom to a delay pedal in that sort of price range which in this case is going to be the TC Electronic flashback too. So this video is probably going to be fairly long so I'll put timings in the video's description but I just want to start out by doing kind of a feature comparison of these two pedals. So let's just briefly talk about the build quality. The Zoom is metal. It feels solid. The TC Electronic is also metal and feels solid. Obviously the Zoom does have this screen here which if it's on the floor may be liable to be stepped on or have things dropped on it. Also these knobs here, encoders I should say, are sort of plastic and they're clicky. So also the angle that they're at also makes me feel a little bit worried. They don't feel like they're going to fall off or anything but if this was on the floor, if you were indeed stomping on it I would maybe be a little bit worried about it. So the controls on the flashback are fairly straightforward. You have a mode knob for selecting the different delay types. So you have a digital analog tape, dynamic and a number of other ones. We'll take a look at those in detail. As we go on we have a delay time knob. We have a feedback knob and we have a level knob for the delay signal. We have this selector here which will modify the range of the delay and also the tap tempo because it does indeed have tap tempo. If you press and hold the foot switch it will go into tap tempo mode sort of momentarily. You can tap in a tempo and away you go. So these will change the timing divisions and importantly the last one will offset the left and right signal if you're working in stereo. So you get different timings on each side to give you a stereo width. That also applies when you're turning the delay knob as well. The foot switch on the flashback also serves another purpose and it's related to this mash, don't know whether you can see this here, mash feature here and basically depending on what mode you're on or what tone print which we'll get to you're on you can press and then press down further on the foot switch and that will do something to the preset often. For example it will ramp up the feedback to get you into self-oscillation. We should also talk about these last three settings on the mode knob. These are your tone print settings and the tone print if you're not familiar with it is the t-selectronic way of getting new modes, new delay sounds in this case or reverb sounds if it was their reverb pedal etc into the pedal. The way that you can do this well there's two different ways of doing it there's a phone app and the idea is that you hold your phone to your guitar pickup if you're playing it with a guitar and it uploads it that way or there's a desktop app as well which is what I tend to use USB connection on the back. It's worth knowing that there is a tone print editor available for the desktop which allows you to go really really in depth into pretty much everything about the delay sound. I'm not going to touch on that too much in this video although I will demo a tone print that I've made that I like but you really can tailor so much you know the filtering of the delay the saturation of the delay the offset between the left and right sides the way that things are filtered even the way that the knobs react and what they actually do this doesn't have to be a delay knob actually you can reassign the functions to all sorts of internal parameters you can also do things like modulation and pitching up you can really really craft something that is sort of uniquely yours with the tone print and it's pretty straightforward to use and it's definitely something that's worth digging into if you get any of the tone print pedals actually if you're interested let me know in the comments I'll be happy to do a video where I walk through making a new delay sound from scratch using tone print because I think that would be pretty good fun I guess the final thing to talk about here actually is the final sort of real mode here which is this will also act as a loop pedal I think it's up to 40 seconds if it's working in mono which is pretty generous it's a fairly basic looper you've got no reverse or pitch up or anything like that it's just sort of sound on sound looping but it's certainly a nice thing to have in a pinch I didn't have a loop pedal sort of hanging around in my home studio so it's a nice little addition if that's something I actually want so the zoom at first looks like it has fewer controls but actually that's not the case at all so you have these three knobs here but these three knobs also act as buttons for doing various things you also have this sort of d-pad arrangement around the the center foot switch for navigating various menus because there are indeed menus presets and so on so we can go up and down select different models so so we wanted the lo-fi delay as we turn the knobs we will go into the detail view of what we're seeing here so now we have the controls for each of these but we can also page through so there are multiple pages on some of these and I think this is probably the most important thing to note about the zoom is that when we talk about this being a multi effects it is a multi effects in the true sense in that you can run multiple effects at once so at the moment we have one pedal in our chain but I can add in another pedal so perhaps say I wanted a reverb to be after that one so now I have two pedals a reverb and a delay which I can turn on and off independently you can store presets you can move pedals around there's some limited routing that you can do in there as well you can load multiple different models I think I've got up to like seven different pedals in there so it really is very generous in what you get in such a small space and for a relatively small amount of money unlike the flashback there's no sort of deep editing that you can do however it is worth noting that in the last month or so a hack has been released essentially which allows you to load all of the other effects from the multi-stomp series so primarily that gives you access to things like distortions into any of the multi-stomp pedals so although this one hasn't been hacked but this has just got chorus delays and reverbs plus some other modulation effects it is possible now you can find the links online to upgrade this pedal even further to have a bunch of other effects on top of the stuff that it came with which was already really very generous so that's another sort of tick in the box for the zoom in terms of flexibility so we'll be getting into the sound demos really soon but first I just want to go through a couple of sort of frequently asked questions just to cover those off before we get there so first of all power both the pedals can be powered off a standard effects pedals nine volt power supply in terms of batteries if you want to take them out and about the zoom will run off two AA batteries weirdly rather than the normal nine volt batteries they don't last terribly long but you can do it the flashback will also run off a nine volt battery I haven't tried using a nine volt battery but given that this is a sort of very digital pedal I can't imagine it lasts that long from experience but that's just a guess but again both these pedals run off batteries as well so you can take them out about if you want to do that so now let's talk about signal levels so these are both guitar effects pedals sort of originally so when we're plugging in our synths we're going to be giving them a line level output which is much much higher than what you would get from a guitar so do they handle line level outputs the zoom yes it does generally it's pretty hard unless you're hitting a really hot signal to make it clip on on one effect but as you start to put multiple effects together you do often get into into pedal or into into effects so between say the delay and reverb here you may get clipping in between those effects which is really really harsh ugly digital clipping no real redeeming feature so you do need to be a little bit careful with that a lot of the pedals will have a separate level control actually this one the lo-fi delay doesn't a lot of them do and you can use that to kind of stop yourself from getting that ugly digital clipping the flashback also works absolutely fine with line level signals if you hit it really hot the delays tend to grunge up a bit the dry signal doesn't for reasons i'll get to but the delays do grunge up but most of them grunge up in quite a pleasant way i found that driving the tape delay algorithm hard gives you quite a nice gritty sound for example so you can use that creatively but do be aware that you will get that grittiness and grungeiness if you hit them too hot so in a lot of the demos you'll see later i'll be running the volume on the synths lower than i normally would probably just to give you a more representative sound demo so next do they work in stereo and when you ask that question you're probably asking one of two different things and i'll try and answer both of those the first is if you give it a stereo signal both left and right does it honor that stereo-ness on the delay as it comes out in the case of the flashback yes it does stereo stuff going in will always be stereo coming back out in the case of the zoom it depends which model you are using some of them work in stereo some of them will sum to mono the other thing you may be asking when you're talking about stereo is whether or not you can get sort of a ping pong delay by giving it a mono signal and then get that width by getting sort of ping pong sounds on the flashback the answer is yes in all cases and if you have the switch set to the bottom even tweaking your delay knob will always give you stereo width because it'll be giving you different subdivisions on left and right the zoom again it depends a lot of the delay models have some kind of either independent stereo per side timings or they have a dedicated ping pong mode but not all of them some of them will again only work either in mono or just pass through the stereo left and right in the demos um i'm going to always run the flashback in stereo because i think probably taking a mono synth signal and making it to stereo ping pong is a common thing that you want to do if i can do it on a preset on the zoom i will but if i can't i will leave it in mono agonized over whether that's a fair comparison but that's what i settled on okay next question is there a analog dry through on the flashback yes there is so that means that there is no delay caused by analog to digital conversion on the dry sound so if you put this in an aux send or an effects loop you won't get any comb filtering the zoom everything is digitized including your dry signal so if you put this in in parallel or something so again in an aux send um you will potentially get comb filtering artifacts happening uh with your dry sound so that's something to be aware of absolutely fine though if you're using it as an insert in line okay next can it go 100 wet so this is going to be important again if you are putting this in an aux send if it goes 100 wet then you don't need to worry about the dry sound being sort of redoubled through the send uh on the flashback uh yes you can kill the dry signal altogether but you do that by way of a dip switch inside the pedal um so that takes the the dry signal out altogether so all you get coming out of the pedal is the delay sound the level control is not a mixed control it is the the level of the delay sound the volume of the delay sound on the zoom it depends on the model again this is the standard answer i think here some of the mixes are wet dry so turn that knob all the way to the right to get rid of the dry signal but some of them are a um delay level instead in which case you can't get rid of the dry sound finally before we get into the sound demos can it go long and weird and ambient zoom yes absolutely the maximum delay time on a lot of the models is really really long four seconds but you can make it go longer by giving it tap tempo and setting the timing division uh much higher uh can it go very weird a lot of the models are very very weird indeed so yes absolutely long and weird the zoom can do that is a common thread with the zoom pedal which is why people like using it for sort of ambient jams with their synths uh on the flashback can it go long and weird well it can certainly go long um on a lot of the models i think the maximum delay time is like seven seconds which is pretty huge um can it go weird yes absolutely the basic delay sounds aren't super weird but you can certainly push them into sort of sort of rolling feedback in a lot of cases but once you get into the tone prints yeah i mean there's just loads of stuff that you can play with there uh that is long weird ambient and lovely so that's plenty of talking let's get into the sound demos i'm not going to go through every single model um i'm going to do like for like where i can uh so uh digital analog tape um modulated octave up i will do a like for like comparison i will then uh after the comparisons show off some of the weirder uh delay sounds on the zoom and also a tone print that i made on the flashback in all of the demos i will start with something that's tempo synced explore some of the parameters i will then tend to go short to hear sort of slapbacky type sounds and then very very long crank the the feedback etc to see where we can push the sounds as well as i said before uh the flashback is always going to be in stereo the zoom will be in stereo in any of the modes when it can i'll reserve my judgment uh until the end so i don't cloud your judgment but uh after the demos join me at the end of the video and i'll tell you what i thought without further ado here's a bunch of sounds so what did i think so tonally if we're talking sort of pure sonics on the things that we did sort of the ab test son i have to say that generally i preferred the sound of the flashback it wasn't always totally clear cut i don't think but it did tend to have uh a depth to it that the zoom sometimes lacked that's not to say the zoom sounded bad just next to the flashback i could hear that there was a difference i think a good um place to hear that is just on the pure digital delay you know digital they should be sort of clean and clean and clean and just a perfect replication but there was something about the flashback that sounded a bit more deep and interesting a bit more 3d i guess um so yeah it's only this worked better for me certainly the zoom had all of those other modes uh baked in i love the lo-fi delay that i showed off for example um and the filter ping pong it's it's super cool especially when you put it on drums and get something rhythmic happening you know they're they're all really really useful and those are modes that you would maybe struggle to replicate directly with the the flashback even with the tone prints um that's what i like my sort of dirty tape tone print on here as well one thing i noticed that was really different between the two of them in most modes was how it dealt with having the delay time changed in real time in most cases apart from the tape i think when you changed the uh delay time on the zoom it would basically go silent while it readjusted the the delay buffer meaning that if you tried to make delay time tweaks in real time you basically have a gap in your delay sound you could maybe cover that up i have like a delay another delay further on down that you could switch into while you're adjusting times or a reverb or something but it makes it really difficult to do those kind of weird delay time sweeps that the flashback did really really well and what was really interesting about the flashback is that on like the analog and tape modes uh changing that delay time gave you that sort of stretchy squashy um tape and analog sort of interpolated uh delay time so you had that smooth transition you could do all those sort of pitchments but what i hadn't really considered or or seen really for myself until i did this video actually so this was really really fun for me is that on the digital ones when you change the delay time especially if you go from long delay times and back it seems to smash the buffer so you don't get um gaps but you can hear the digital glitches get introduced and actually with the feedback turned up high that's a fantastic sound happening in stereo getting this kind of digital glitchy texture and then with the delay down low on the digital modes so on the on the petrol digital one and on like the uh modulated and uh uh crystal modes uh moving the delay time with the delay really low gave you almost like granular textures i've barely played with the digital ones out of some sort of weird snobbery or something i don't really know but i'm going to go back to them because i could see myself creating entire loops based around those glitchy textures to sit as a bed under other sounds um so i'm really glad that i did this video just for discovering that um again don't let it sound like i am coming down hard on the zoom i don't think the zoom sounds bad and the flexibility that it gives you in terms of being able to layer up multiple different virtual pedals all in a row it's just such an incredible sound design tool that if you know one single delay is not quite as three-deal rich as as as the stuff on the tc electronics you know that is a huge huge deal and you know you you can't do that with the flashback so if you're really looking for something that's sort of sonically adventurous then the zoom still is a great uh great buy that said the flashback does have the tone print editor so you can get in really in depth with your sound design but only on one delay set anyway hope that was useful and interesting and you enjoyed it if you did please if you could take the time to just tap that thumbs up button it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside and make sure you're subscribed to the channel if you're not already um we do lots of things with synths here and and and effects and uh i'm sure there'll be more stuff that you'll find interesting coming up soon other than that as always thank you so much for joining me until next time take care bye