DigiTech RP250 review

Image 1 of 2

Salt Lake City is famous for three things: Mormons, DigiTech and knowing how to rock. Just check out Mötley Crüe's Lewd, Crüed & Tattooed DVD to witness the tit-flashing exuberance of Salt Lake's repressed rock chicks.

And when you plug into a DigiTech product, you can rest assured it was made by a guy with five wives who likes to mosh to Cowboys From Hell. Well, possibly... What we do know for sure about DigiTech is that it designs its own processing chips. This might not sound very rock 'n' roll, but the company claims that other manufacturers will just dump any old chip in their multi-FX units. Not DigiTech. Its RP150 and RP250 models have processors specifically designed to provide you with great guitar sounds. It's got to be a plus that your tone isn't coming from the same chip that runs your PC or your microwave! The RP150 and RP250 are very similar units, but the main difference is that the RP250 comes with a built-in expression pedal for an extra £50. But does that make it a better buy than the RP150?

The expression pedal is essential if you want to use the wah, whammy or volume pedal sounds to their full potential. But its uses don't stop there; you can set it to do pretty much anything. For example, you could set it to distortion 'off' in the heel down position, and distortion 'on' with toe down for a solo boost. You'd be hard pushed to buy a decent expression pedal for the extra cash, so unless you've already got one kicking around, that's a strong case for buying the RP250 straight away.

This model comes with the bigger display, which makes editing a lot clearer. The RP250 has an auxiliary input so you can plug in your iPod or CD player for some instant jamming.

Sounds

There are four more distortion pedal simulations - including the classic Ibanez TS808 Tubescreamer and Hendrix's main stomp, the Fuzz Face - and another four amp simulations, like the Marshall JCM900. The RP150 wasn't lacking in tonal options, but the RP250 is a definite step up. Like its sibling, the RP250 gets pickup simulation, a feature that makes singlecoils roar like humbuckers and humbuckers sparkle like singlecoils. The singlecoil to humbucker transformation is the most successful, really fattening out the tone. It's a bigger challenge to persuade a beefy humbucker to twang like a Strat, but this setting does thin out the sound and give you extra top end, which is a handy compromise for gigs where you can only use one guitar. The RP250 also has some effects that the RP150 lacks, including YaYa (like wah, but goes yaaa...), rotary speaker simulation for those classic 60s Uni-Vibe tones, and VibroPan - a combination of vibrato and panning.

There are 20 extra preset and user patches, giving you enough space to play a different tone every day for four months. DigiTech invented the Whammy pedal and, as expected, the Whammy sounds here are totally awesome: Tom Morello's Rage Against The Machine tones are on tap, and the emulations of the Vox and Crybaby wahs have that monster fatness and bite that we know and love.