Valeton GP-100

Its not often you buy something that surpasses your expectations but Im dead chuffed with this unit. Just your average time to time player,Ive had a Pod 2 and a Roland Micro cube both of which I liked but this is the one l really connected with and you get the sense of playing a proper amp on it. I was also totally shocked to discover that the USB is Audio In & Out which means I can plug it in to the computer, have my headphones connected to the GP100 and noodle away whilst the output of the computer comes to the headphones too. So useful for practicing against youtube tutorials etc. It was recognised without drivers tho it needed to be on the back usb ports on my MacPro 5,1 after that it worked great. I opened a new project in Logic, hit record and bingo, hi-quality audio recorded straight in, no faffing with mics etc. I really like a lot of the presets and like the Chorus-A a lot. The amps sound nice to me, I only finally learned about the different sounds of each type recently and discovered that my favourite is the Fender Tweed sound and this seems to do that well. Drum machine inside is simple but will be useful. I didnt want to spend a lot of money, just wanted something to practice with headphones on and was amazed at what came in the box. Happy customer.

I bought this to get a feel for digital modellers and honestly it really surprised me how good the tones were. The amp models are great and you can get a lot of really really good tones out of it. The effects are very good aswell. I distinctly remember the WAH being truly amazing, very smooth and responsive. The fact that you can load your own IRs and do one output with/without cabsim is fantastic. You can run it into a real cab via power amp and have the other output go out to FOH with your own IR. The only thing missing from this is XLR outputs, but I don't really see where you could put them.

The only con I have with this unit and the reason I ended up upgrading to something a little more expensive was the crossfade when switching presets. You can't really go from a distorted heavy metal tone to a clean tone instantly, there's a very audible crossfade between the two. But, I imagine it gets better/worse depending on the amount of the effects on the presets. Also, tweaking the global EQ really makes this thing come alive.