Muse Research MuseBox Reviews

4.6/5.0 based on 5 customer reviews

Sort By Date Sort By Rating

Customer Reviews

Reginald Simmons
from Helena, Ark.
June 25, 2012Music Background:
Pro musician, Live Sound Engineer,Recording Engineer

Virtual instrument technology

This is the best investment I have ever made!! Cant wait until the plugins are available!! I am a MIDI bass guitar player and I have matched the MIDI bass with the MUSE box, you won't believe it till you hear it!!!!!

benny green
from take a guess
May 25, 2012Music Background:
student (activist, anarchist)

ha!

this last guy was working with the 'peavey muse box'... and i'd have to agree, the yamaha moose box is excellent... almost as good as the muffresearch std box. excellent in all ways. makes me wonder if these reviews are real or not... don't think this review will be posted... but whoever's reading this, WE'RE ON TO YOU! ! !

Daniel K
from Knoxville, TN
May 20, 2012Music Background:
amateur musician

Fantastic VST unit

The Peavey Musebox is everything I had hoped it would be. It has fantastic VST quality samples which can be layered. Multiple effects can be applied. When a selection of sounds plus effects is "tweaked" just the way you like it you can save the combination as a preset for instant recall. The Peavey ReValver software also sounds excellent for guitar and the vocal effects are great. This is very user friendly but can be very in-depth if you want. Guitarists and keyboardists alike will love the limitless capabilities and sounds available. It is truly a professional sound module/effects processor. Keyboardists: No worries with grating cheap sampled sounds like you find on many synthesizers. Musebox samples are pristine all up and down the scale. This is a "plug and play" device. Samples load within seconds and there is no latency. Computer interface works very well and is not cumbersome. Peavey and Musebox A+++. There is nothing else on the market like it. It is worth every penny. I will be enjoying it for years to come.

Cam
from Sedona, AZ
June 5, 2012Music Background:
Songwriter, semi-pro musician

Solid performance, decent sounds, good (not great) acoustic pianos

Got my Musebox in today and spent the evening getting familiar with it and trying out the sounds. My main interest has been to get a killer acoustic piano sound for live gigs... something as good as my Galaxy Vintage-D, which is the best-sounding VST I've ever used. Of course, everyone has different tastes in pianos, and I'm partial to fairly bright ones. My perfect piano sounds like Sarah McLachlan's, or maybe Elton John's off the Honky Chateau album (i.e. Rocket Man), which is probably too harsh for most classical pianists.

The Musebox has quite a few piano presets to choose from, and the star of the show is apparently the "Big" Concert Grand, which is supposedly 800 MB. Most patches load fairly quickly, but this one seems to be the biggest one in the box... close to 30 seconds. Not surprisingly, it sounded the best of all the presets, but I never did find a piano sound that was "just right". The Big grand was a bit muddy for my taste, sounding more like a Baldwin than a Steinway, and some of the velocity and dynamics seemed a bit off for my controller. These are adjustable (from your PC) and I haven't played with the settings, but I assume you can probably fine-tune them to suit both your taste and your midi controller. Other than some midi settings, you aren't really able to customize the presets too much though.

One of the presets is the True Piano "Amber", which is a VST you can buy off the Internet for $79. It has gotten generally good reviews for having a decent sound for such a low price, and it gets kudos for it's small CPU footprint. It uses modeling rather than sampling as I recall. For me it was another case of "close but no cigar"... just TOO bright and harsh, and a little artificial sounding in some parts of the keyboard.

In short, the on-board pianos aren't bad, but I don't think they compare to the best VSTs like Ivory or Galaxy.

The Musebox finally redeemed itself when I realized that you can combine piano sounds, and I came really close to what I was after by combing the muddy "Big" grand and the too bright True Piano Amber into one preset. Finally, a killer piano patch for live gigs!

So now that I'd combined two piano patches, one of which was huge, I was wondering if I'd run into CPU problems. I spent an hour playing it, and it didn't hear it glitch once.

You can use up to two instrument patches plus two effects patches simultaneously, so I next decided to run my mic through one of the on-board effects (Camel Phatt) while using my two combined piano patches. Not only did the effects mostly sound like crap, they instantly caused the pianos to hit the CPU limit. I run into limits with my dual-core I-5 PC too, so I sort of expected that would happen if I overdid it. Based on how quickly the other patches load, I doubt that any are likely to cause CPU issues like the large piano patches. To be fair, there are a whole lot of effects I haven't explored yet, but the Camel Phatt vocal effects seemed pretty useless to me.

There are a lot of Wurly and Rhodes E.P. patches as well as some really nice sounding B3, but none of these are critical to me because you can get decent patches of this sort on just about any synth. One of the organ patches has a nice B3 "growl" , i.e. distortion (maybe a bit TOO much) that I've never heard on any patch before. It is nice to be able to get all these sounds while just taking one keyboard to the gig, and I can choose the midi controller that is most to my liking.

The acoustic guitar patches sound cheesy compared to my RealGuitar VST. There are also LOTS more patches I haven't checked out yet,

Supplied software lets you create your own patches (combinations of existing sounds and effects) and modify midi settings such as keyboard velocity, transpose, etc. It's a cinch to use, although the Musebox did reboot one time when I was saving a custom patch.

In short, this is pretty much Receptor "lite", just like Muse Research says, but it seems a solid box and puts a lot of good, realistic patches at your fingertips. It's biggest drawback is not letting you load your favorite VSTs, but for nearly 1/2 the price of the Receptor I guess this is a fair tradeoff. If I were still playing professionally I;d probably go for the Receptor, but as more of a hobbyist these days the Musebox fits my needs at a reasonable price.

Frenchy Cordero
from Chicago
June 2, 2012Music Background:
Working Musician

Peavey and Muse Research build the Peavey MuseBox. Ha, indeed.

The Peavey MuseBox is just what was needed...a portable, highly flexible unit.