Zoom B1X FOUR Bass Multi-effects Processor with Expression Pedal Reviews

Yes, it's plastic, and doesn't quite match the quality of the $1600 multi effects out there.
But let's get real. For the price, you really can't beat it. This is a great tool for practicing. It replaces $1000 in pedals I have, and is so convenient.
Will likely try it at rehearsals and potentially gigs.
5 STARS because 6 isn't offered.

I can't imagine needing anything more in a pedal than what this one can give you. Very simple to learn to use for the beginner, yet plenty of customization for the advanced. You won't be left wondering if it is "worth it", you'll be asking yourself "how did I get this so cheap?"

I opened the box, plugged everything up and I couldn't believe everything this pedal has to offer. I feel like a magician!!

This pedal will take care of you. It has everything you need for a gig; tuner, amp/cab simulators, eq, compressor, drive, volume pedal and much more. The drum machine and looper make fun solo jam features. This pedal has everything you need minus a di output.

This pedal is everything you want and more. I honestly can't think of a reason to every get another pedal when it comes to bass. I use it as much as I use my amp. It is so intuitive and really just an essential overall.

You can't go wrong with the B1X! Simple to use and packed with effects. Great for beginners because you don't have to invest in an amplifier right off, plug in headphones and practice away, gives you time to decide. If you already have an amplifier plug inline and jam. Besides the great features built in the B1X customer service at Sweetwater is Second to none! I was so impressed with my B1X and Sweetwater's customer service I bought the G1X also.

Don't let the low price or the plastic build fool you, the Zoom B1X actually has really Great quality bass sounds. I feel like the sounds that come with this pedal were created by someone with a great ear. It doesn't sound like someone just put guitar effects on a bass but it sounds like really great bass guitar sounds. Before I got this pedal I was struggling to get a really great bass sound but now I got several different sounding really great bass tones that I can edit anyway I want. Don't know if the effects are actually better for bass or if they were just created by someone with a better ear for bass guitar but I like these custom bass tone better than the bass guitar sounds that come custom with the Peavey Viper amps, the line 6 Helix, and the Boss GT-1000. Funny how such great bass sounds come in such an inexpensive pedal, but this pedal is probably what Im going to run all my bass tracks through. It also comes with some drum beats. Great for Bassists. I never had so much fun practicing bass. : )

I have recently started purchasing from Sweetwater. Having owned a business I know what good customer service is. One to five stars I rate Keith Klikas FIVE STAR. The company is overall excellent and Keith is outstanding.

I just picked up the Zoom B1X Four and am totally enjoying it.

It literally takes care of all my bass needs. As bass players we normally dont get much range in effects. But this peddle has unlimited possibilities. I am so glad i got one.

This pedal has more options and features than most will ever figure out. It is great to experiment with and try out different sounds. In hindsight, I would not get the expression pedal version. It is hard to use and really doesn't work very well. Just makes it take up more space.

This has a lot of bang for the buck. You basically get 4 pedals per channel, and each pedal has it's own settings. It also has a drum machine (not programmable, just presets) that really sounds pretty good if you put your bass through a cabinet and a subwoofer.

I use this pedal for practice. I like the drum machine majority of presets are useable. The fuzz and distortion sound a bit digital but for the price point you can't beat it.

I got this for a friend and got to play with it for a while. A lot of the presets were really fun and sounded especially great. Hard to not play around with the distorted wah patch and not have as stupid grin on your face. For the price it sounds incredible and much better than my Digitech RPX 250 from 15 years ago. We both had trouble on figuring out just how to edit patches but I am sure like with most devices of this type that comes with time. There is editing software available but we didn't try it. I'm sure that simplifies things further.

Definitely recommended.

I bought this because I am not as tech savvy as most. The simpler the better. I have a B3 but it has proven to be more than I can handle as far as adjusting the parameters.

This is a LOT more user friendly and more "visual" as far as showing me what I am doing to an effect. Is is more compact. I love having a volume pedal.

It has a ton of effect downloads available on their website that I can pick and choose.

The tuner is quick and responsive to alternative tunings.

The 40 preloaded tunings offer a good variety. I can add 10 more or set up 10 in the order I want to used them in the additional 10 "empty" slots it has available for me to use as I please.

For someone like me who wants to expand their sound options without breaking the bank or who is not as experienced with pedals it is a good place to start.

My only "cons" are: It doesn't come with a power supply: I wish it had a Lo-Z output. Otherwise I would have given it 5 stars.

Pedal is easy to use and has some really good features to it. I like it but I think it's more for beginners.

No pro level effects or sims here but for $... I'm confident you won't find better.
Easy to navigate and set up. Plenty of effects and tone shaping options. Solid rythym tracks that sound pretty good.
Overall this may be the best $ I ever spent on a piece of equipment.

I wanted to like this as much as an older Zoom bass multi-effects unit I've owned however, the things I wanted out of it were just not up to professional level IMO. The amp and cab sims were usable and quite a few of the effects sounded good. Not a great synth engine and I was not happy with the distortion tones. Other than that, this pedal is a stellar value for the money.

This is a great all-in-one system with preamp, practice amp, lots of effects and amp/cab simulation. Some of the effects are novelties, but most emulate well-known compressors, preamps, etc. If you're confused by the many similar effects, you can read the effects list (PDF) and use Google to learn the nuances of each.

One caveat about the expression pedal: In the newer Zoom pedals, it's limited to a short list of canned expression effects (volume, wah, pitch shift). I'm more interested in adjusting timbre and texture, parameters like wet/dry mix, strength of distortion, and so on. This was supported in the previous generation of Zoom pedals (B1xON, etc.) but has been removed or dumbed-down for some reason.

Zoom engineers, if you're reading this, please unleash the expression pedal!

I'm not a gear-head, and this is my second effects pedal (I also have a Mooer tender octaver). It has been fun to play with effects without having to buy a dozen individual pedals, and I've just barely scratched the surface. With the looper and drum patterns, this should be a lot of fun. In short, it is a great buy at $99 if you are looking to get a wide variety of sounds.

It is possible to set up patches via the device itself, but it is far, far faster to use Zoom's free "Guitar Lab" software (mac and pc).

There are a few cons, though. Every effects pedal has a simple switch to enable/disable the effect. With the B1(X) Four, you can achieve the same thing by dropping into tuner mode, which acts as a bypass. But there is also an option to make tuner mode silent, which if you are playing with other people, is useful. But if you use that mode, then there is no simply effect bypass.

Another drawback is there is no power on/off -- you unplug the unit from power. If you leave it plugged in for 10 hours without any activity, it shuts itself off. Then when you come back and want to use it, you have to unplug it and plug it back in.

The unit has the idea of effects (akin to the myriad individual effects pedals) and patches, which is a specific sequence of effects with a particular set of parameter settings. In "stomp mode", the five small buttons seen in the midline of the unit are used to bypass individual effects in the chain. This means to use them you have to press the buttons with your finger, as a shoe is way too blunt to pick out one button. But if you want to use the real stomp switches or the pedal, you want it on the floor. That means bending over while playing to enable/disable part of a patch. For a performing musician, that probably makes this less useful.

It comes with 9 or 10 amp simulators and 9 or 10 cabinet simulators. I simply don't appreciate them. If you are in love with a particular 60s tube amp with lots of hum, then you might like it. Also, the sound ultimately is reproduced on and colored by my real amp, so these modelers don't really sound like what they intend. If you take a picture of a 1000 watt light bulb, the picture doesn't really look like a 1000w light source. To me, these amp and cabinet simulators are really just prepackaged hum + clipping + eq. It seems like padding to call them 20 different effects.

Finally, the pedal is underused. I'd love the ability to map the pedal to one of the parameters in the effects chain, but that isn't an option. A few effects use the pedal as a foot switch, and the wah effect uses it for control, but most patches don't use it. I'd love it if the there was a pedal option to make it blend dry (in) with the effect chain output, or to use it as a patch bypass.

Despite the list of negatives, it is a lot of value for the money and don't regret the purchase.

For what you get it is a very good starter pedal. I prefer things that are made of metal and when you make something out of plastic it just sends the vibe that it is a throwaway item. With that said I believe that the pedal is good enough it should be made of metal even though the plastic version seems to be rugged enough for a pedal when you are starting out exploring new sounds in the pedal world. I highly recommend this line of pedals (there's 3... single switch, double switch, and double switch with volume foot pedal) the functions of the pedal are so much it is worth going with the double pedal because when you scroll through, if you pass the one you want you can back up. In my opinion with all the functions it does and the ability to customize them this is a fantastic value.

It didn't do what I had hoped for, and I don't like many of the effects; but only for the effects I like, it's still a great value.

I had hoped it would be a good all-in-one practice station: it's got a small but good list of drum rhythms, a metronome, an aux input to play with music, a looper, and every type of effect one would want. But the output is not strong enough to power headphones to a comfortable volume, so you need to use a practice amp or preamp to do that. More problematically, I found that some of the effects I wanted to use regularly, like amp and cabinet modeling, or overdrive, were bad enough that they weren't usable even for practice. The problems are digital glitches.

For example, the overdrives actually sound pretty good if you get all the levels right and just play a note. But the *responses* are weird. Like, say you want to palm-mute with overdrive: if you set the unmuted sound at a good overdrive level, then with the lower volume of the palm mute, the overdrive goes away and it becomes clean. If you set it higher, palm-mute sounds good, but unmuted becomes unmusical noise. This can happen a bit with analog overdrive too, but it's extreme enough here that you can't really practice metal riffs or Chris Squire style stuff.

Also, there are odd tracking problems. Like, when you palm mute the string, the box seems to notice that the string is shorter, and it plays a note that is a half semitone or full semitone sharp. Again, this happens naturally acoustically a little bit anyway, but it happens so much with this box that palm muting is basically impossible to get sounding right. This happens not only with overdrive, but also with the clean amp and cabinet modeling. Some of the other effects are also too glitchy to use even for practice.

However, there is a lot of good stuff in this pedal. Part of the trick is to learn how to turn on individual effects: this pedal often gets muddy when you try to put too many effects together. (For that reason, I disagree with others who liked the presets.) It's worth the time to go through the individual effects, mess with the settings, and find what you like. I really don't like the overdrives and distortions, but there are plenty of good effects too, like reverb and chorus.

So even if you stick with only the good effects, you've got a volume/expression pedal, a thirty-second looper, a usable reverb and chorus, and a basic drum machine at the minimum--which is a already a great value. So I'm not using it for what I hoped, but I don't regret the purchase!

The Zoom B1X FOUR Effects Pedal includes a variety of effects but the articulation was POOR. Lagging, Muffled, Washed Out, Lacking Definition. This However is the PERFECT PRODUCT for a Novice who is looking to experiment with tone shaping and amp modeling. I did like the Drum Machine and the Looper. ( despite the SHORT run time ) I now realize what effects I wan, how I want to set them up, ( the ability to overlay effects ) and most importantly, THE COST TO DO IT CORRECTLY... I returned the purchase and am now saving like a MAD MAN.