I just got one of these about a month or so ago. It is a GREAT practice tool for all of the reasons that Yolly mentioned. I can run my Iphone or Microsoft surface and run songs through my rig, and play right along. This is fantastic since I play at different church anywhere between 1-4 times a week and our band leader (my wife) sends out youtube links to give us a sense of how she wants things to go. I can play along and not have to guestimate too much on how we will have to change when we go live. The drum machine is also fun and usable. It sounded way better through my amp than I thought it would. I use it through my headphones, and that has been fantastic as a late at night practice option.
The amp sims are pretty decent, but I was not able to use it as a straight preamp. So for example, I was running the GK sim through my tonehammer input stage, and it would not bypass the Tonehammer's preamp. So I got an interesting combination of my Tonehammer and the GK sound. Not bad, maybe I just needed a poweramp. The thing you have to remember about the amp sims is that they are just that. For example, the Aguilar sim did not sound a lot like my Aguilar TH 500, even though I am running it through my Aguilar.
@PJMuck....I don't know yet how I feel about using this live. I tried using it a couple of times live, and I have been less in love with it just because you have to work through the banks of patches to get to the one you want. I wanted to try some effects, and used this for some chorus and delay, some trebly overdrive, and some synth. The synths are pretty solid, but accessing them on the fly was tricky. For example, I wanted to run an overdriven sound for a verse, and then return to clean, no problem, but then when I wanted to turn back to chorus for a quite interlude after the song, I had to bump through a few of the patches, including my overdriven setting, and it kind of ruined the mood of the song because of the changes in EQ inherent to using different patches. You might want the B3, with 3 presets you can bank, for live use, but that is just me. This is definitely worth the 50 dollars. I don't know if its worth the 200 of a good overdrive pedal, but definitely worth $50! Hope this helps.
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