it’s budget multi effect time and in this little box is the sonicake matri box which is coming in at just over 100 which is an absolute crazy price if it’s any good so I’m going to go straight to the sound samples so you can decide for [Music] yourself the first thing I have to comment is the fact that every preset on this matre box is drowning in Reverb and once I reduced the Reverb the tones actually started to sound a lot better so whoever set these presets loves a little bit of space so every preset you hear in this video is not the original but all I’ve done is reduced the level of Reverb mix and when I did that that actually sounded pretty good I am recording it via USB so it’s a stereo USB panned hard left and right so there’s any ping ponging you should hear it with those headphones that you’re wearing or those high quality Studio speakers you might not hear it if you’re listening through a smartphone anyway I’m monitoring it through the F12 ffr speaker from Fender and I have checked that what you’re hearing and what I’m hearing are at least extremely similar and with that preset I’m pretty happy that’s a good high gain tone but let’s see if it does something more [Music] ambient [Music] so there’s a nice little patch called dreamy and it’s a tape modulation into a jazz 120 it’s a jc120 from Roland that classic clean amp and then I’m just looking at the screen here cuz I’ve also got the software up so I’ll put that on screen for you it’s a supero 1×6 cab tiny and then some reverse delay chorus and a plate Reverb and while it might not be the biggest stereo ambient highly defined uh ambient patch I’ve ever heard it’s certainly usable and for again I’m saying the price again for about a 100 bucks that’s really really good and I’m sure I could improve that patch but does it also Funk let’s find out [Music] [Applause] [Music] right I’m aware that in my reviews I can be somewhat over positive so there are some things about the matri Box sounds that I don’t like and I’ll go into that later however this funk tone is one of the best Funk tones I’ve ever played and just plugging in that I’ll be a custom shop Telly um through this just sounds glorious and sounds record quality and that tone if you’re looking for a funk tone don’t go out and buy a compressor for a little bit buy one of these a 100 bucks or so and that’s going to get you that tone it’s brilliant right but does it do rock can you use it for classic riffs [Music] so that was a Plexi sort of preset and for me this is where a lot of pedals and budget modelers really fall short of the mark and the matri Box while not being the most convincing amp sound in the room to me certainly again does a good enough job and I’m trying not to mention the price but I am absolutely gobsmacked that it has this range of tones no that is not the best plexy sound I’ve ever heard it’s also not the worst that I’ve spent more money on so yeah I really really enjoyed that and I could happily use that as either a backup or certainly on a record where something’s buried in a or not even buried in a mix but in a mix with other stuff but I want to know if it does some dropped sea heavy [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] riffage so that was the flyman B1 amp I have no idea what kind of amp that could be so if you recognize fly man B1 as some kind of pun of a real amp then let me know in a comment cuz I’m very curious but in the room with this drop C guitar was absolutely really fun to play and that’s one of those patches presets that I could have played for a long time and really bored you to death with the same riff over and over again but I think that’s enough sound samples for now let’s have a look at the pedal and talk about the build quality and whether you can actually use this on stage so here it is we’ve got two Stompy switches which do a number of things and an expression pedal which is your standard wire expression volume Etc then we’ve got a little LCD screen which is really easy to read two massive buttons which are main volume or master volume I should say then parameter switch which you can also press which takes you into the the menu just there back will bring you back out save will’ll unsurprisingly save something and then you’ve got global settings which again you can check with the parameters back at that and then drums and one thing I found out whilst recording this video is the drums do not record via [Music] USB but they do play through the speaker that was coming through my vocal mic right then so if you’re using a jack line out um you can get the drums to come through the speaker that you’re monitoring but if you’re recording via USB which you can I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that it’s got 44.1 khz um audio interface in there but you can only record two tracks whereas the most most the more expensive stuff you can record three or four TRS giving you two wets and two dries I say but don’t forget again how expensive this is not very so if I hold down the drum button it gives me the Drum menu and then I can press that and that’ll start them and you’ve got all these different presets Rock [Music] one they’re not the best sounding drums in the world world but when you’re grooving along with them it kind of doesn’t matter there’s no way I would use it for performance but for practicing and for just making sure that you’re keeping in time I actually really really liked it and there’s some presets in the drums that are weirdly named and also the first preset is D and B and normally preset number one is is like rock one that that sort of surprised me but that sounds good yeah good then we’ve got uh BPM that you can change just there and You’ got sync for on or off which is syncing it to the BPM of the pedal which you can apparently tap Tempo I haven’t found out how to do that yet I will do in a minute and then you got drum volume so I’m going to look in the global settings and see if there’s a way to actually send the drums to one channel and then the guitar to another should have done that before making this video so I had a look and as far as I can see you cannot send the drums to the left channel for example and the guitar to the right thus sending drums to the PA and the guitar to an an amp I guess that’s a real shame if I’m wrong there by the way sonicake please let me know and I’ll put a note and pin that as a comment let’s have a look at the global settings though because I think you’re going to be very pleasantly surprised we do that by pressing Global and then we’ve got input output and this is very reminiscent of a certain multiprocessor uh made by line six we’ve got these different parameter knobs down here which are your Global parameter knobs on everything down here we can adjust the inputs and then this is brilliant you can globally set no cab on both sides so that means if you’re going through a PA speaker or an ffr speaker like I am this is not a guitar amp it just looks like one then you need to have cab simulation turned on and you can do that in every preset or you can do it globally so that every preset is set the same because if you then want to put this matri box through the effects return of a guitar amp with a guitar speaker in it you can globally turn on the no cab because you don’t want a cab simulation going through an actual guitar cab because then you’re doing it twice and it’ll sound terrible believe me I’ve done it to have that globally in something at this price is mindboggling next page of the global is USB audio now we’ve got unbelievably many options we’ve got record level so if you’re finding that it’s a bit too hot for in the Daw then just turn that down if it’s not loud enough turn it up of course you know how volume works then you’ve got monitor level then the very cool thing here is you’ve got wet record mode for the left and then you’ve got wet hang on go back there second page of USB audio is wet record mode for the right and you can change that to dry and this means that when you’re recording via USB with those two channels left and right stereo one of them can be the sound that you’re hearing so that preset or that patch that you’ve made the other one will be a dry signal which is just like having your guitar plugged directly into the Daw no processing down by the B box or just the audio conversion of course but there’s going to be no effects on it giving you a clean signal so you can reamp that later that’s really cool and I’m asking a lot but I really really wish it was four Channel or at least three channel so you could have left and right from the matri box and then plus a dry signal anyway let’s put that back on wet cuz I want it on whoops wet still getting used to that there we go now next page tap Tempo mode so you can tap Tempo just the just effect one or effects you can tap temp about everything see or you can just tap Temple the things you want again attention to detail I haven’t seen in something of this price then we’ve got expression pedal setting that is this thing here of course you can set the range so you can just have it have a little bit of range or the full range volume you can just like have it maximum there and have it dip down maybe by a few debel so ah there we go so so I could to Max is 99 and minimum I could set to 70ish therefore it only dropped down just a little bit so if you want to leave it there and then kick in for a solo to go a bit louder that’s what that does I’m aware that was kind of a speedrun through of the global settings but I am so surprised at how tweakable this thing is and how clever Sonic cake have been in giving you all that functionality it doesn’t have the drums left and right that would be something cool and that must be able to be POS hang on let’s just try and plug this this here into the right output see if the drums come through there maybe it’s set there normally no it’s coming through left and right oh that’s that’s kind of a shame but again to be expected in a budget unit and fixable in a potential future firware update sonicake do that it will add so much more functionality so much more room for activities okay I’ve purposefully put this myb Albatross Out Of Tune so I can show you the tuner you get there by pressing those buttons together at the same time and I think that is such a clear tuner and I like the way that you just have to tap those two buttons so I’m going to [Music] tune there you go and it goes massive green is that is it really showing that well so there’s yellow that’s [Music] green if you go too high or too low I’m trying to there we go there’s a bit of red there can you see the red on the end amazing I I haven’t found out how to do tap Tempo yet it says it’s got it there I don’t know how to do it I don’t see a button anywhere for it I’ve read the manual as well there’s nothing there but this also has bass sounds so let’s hear some of [Music] those [Music] now I’m not a bass player by far but I would definitely use some of those tones in mixes there’s some great sounds there don’t forget just over 100 bucks it also has acoustic guitar sound so I’m going to line up three different AC Acoustics the fander acoua Sonic the plus from Mexico my very expensive tayor acoustic and my very affordable ibz acoustic let’s hear them all through the same [Music] [Applause] [Music] patch [Music] I just had a listen back to that and firstly I think the acoua Sonic sounds the best hands down even though it didn’t sound that great in the room so I’m not sure what that means also uh three different guitars same preset three entirely different sounds which says something about the buying and selling of presets anyway this if I haven’t given you enough information about it already and shocked you with how much you can get for just over a 100 bucks it has software as well available for PC and for mac and here it is and if you’re not a fan of editing stuff on tiny little buttons on the floor then you can edit it via USB via this software which looks a lot like Helix native so that’s definitely where they’ve got some inspiration Maybe a little bit of headrush in Studio One as well but yeah look at all those presets then you got the users as well you can Import and Export to a file um and then you can go in and change all these things on your computer rather than on the device itself you can also put it in stomp mode I don’t know how you do that on the unit but there it is uh on on the software amazing so if you haven’t gathered already there’s a lot of stuff packed into this tiny box and Tiny it is this is a boss D s1w and it is about the same height as a boss compact pedal it’s about the width of one two about this width of three just more than three boss pedals and with the expression pedal down the boss pedal is actually a little bit higher and with it up it’s there’s not much in it one of the negative things about the small compact size is that the expression pedal is quite tiny yeah this is much smaller than a crybaby for example and these are fairly close together but but far enough away from the expression pedal however you might accidentally hit them together bringing you into the tuner and killing your tone to summarize the matri box from Sonic cake is not the best sounding multi effects pedal I’ve ever heard but for this price it is absolutely the top pedal I’ve ever played this is a 100 bucks at the moment I’ve just checked on Amazon And1 will get you all that stuff and I can’t think of the last time that something offered so much value if you’re a beginner then absolutely try one of these it is not worth you getting something more expensive than this because this has everything you need including a Looper just press that you’ve got a Looper the only thing I can’t really speak for is the longevity and the customer support but all the connections feel solid it’s USBC it feels I’m I’m pretty sure that’s plastic but it is a hard hard plastic it might even be metal I don’t no it is metal let’s have a look it’s metal on that’s metal I don’t know don’t quote me on anything there but what I’m trying to say it’s Road worthy it’s very rare that I’m so forceful with a recommendation but if I could give this 11 stars out of 10 I would it is absolutely fantastic it’s cheap it’ll do everything you need for most shows I I I can’t believe how good it is yeah so links in the video description and first comment there’s a subscribe button you want more from me and as always leave a comment to let me know what you think but remember it doesn’t matter what you play it matters why you play I’ll see you in the next one bye-bye
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings