4Pockets StompBox review

With the aid of an iOS audio interface and some headphones, StompBox aims to provide a guitar practice facility on your iPad. It supplies you with up to 12 simultaneous effects in a virtual rack controlled by a virtual pedalboard, alongside a phrase-training-equipped media player for loading MP3s and playing along. You also get a tuner, metronome and a four-track loop recorder.

With just one main scrollable page that shows the foot controller at the top and the rack below it, StompBox is easy to use and has 12 available banks of six patches. Four banks are loaded with factory presets, some of which we found to be instantly usable, others just a wall of noise.

Not to worry though - the noisy presets just need the gain knobs on some of the components turned down, plus you can easily put your own rack together and create your own patches, all quickly recalled with the virtual foot controller, which also lets you enable and disable individual effects.

To accompany the single preamp you can choose from 17 effect modules which cover all the popular guitar effects and have many adjustable parameters, allowing the possibility of dialling in a wide range of playable tones.

While the distortion sounds can get a wee bit fizzy at times, there are some sounds here that work just fine in a practice situation. And, combined with the song playback, phrase-training and recording facilities, StompBox provides a very useful guitar resource for iPad owners.