I've just received a couple of Kmise pedals bought via 'Wish', a similar type of outfit to Aliexpress. The US Dream and the Crunch Distortion (Rat clone). the Crunch Distortion is very distortiony, it doesn't do clean at all. Not a bad pedal if you want a lot of distortion that cuts off very quickly. But the gain and volume knob legends are crossed over, which is a bit confusing.
The US Dream I found very 'meh'. With low gain, there's too much top end missing to be of any use as a clean(ish) boost. You have to add quite a lot of gain to add back in some top end. And to get it sounding good at all, you have to dial in a lot of volume and gain, which makes it just so much louder than the bypassed level. So it's more a pedal for recording, so you can set your amp volume accordingly, or else have it permanently on. It's just about usable, but other pedals do it so much better, so why bother?
I also bought a Coolmusic Reverberry from Amazon whilst I was on my cheap pedal spree. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/...?ie=UTF8&psc=1. £33 with a small offer discount, so almost the cheapest reverb pedal I could find, (the TC Skysurfer at £29 was the cheapest) but with 9 reverb types available instead of the TC's three.
It's a miniaturised (and cheaper) version of this Moog-like Deadbeat Reverberation Station pedal: https://deadbeatsound.com/products/r...ration-station
Was it going to be a bargain Strymon?
What do you think?
Of course not.
It was quiet in bypass but quite noisy when switched on. The reverbs were very echoey and not very smooth. I was getting some digital clipping when I used it in the FX loop of my amp (though the signal/noise ratio was better when not playing) so it had to go in front of the amp as there was no input gain control. Hall was the best reverb setting for guitar, if used in moderation. Spring was overly 'boingy', an impression of a spring reverb rather than how a real one sounds. The plate was nothing like any plate emulations I've heard, very metallic and with distinct echoes. In fact most of them seemed more like a mix of reverb and delay than straight reverb. Lo-Fi just adds a load of noise, that certainly in special-FX only territory. Mod just adds a bland chorus to the whole sound (not just the reverb).
Opening it up, the processor is marked up with "Hotone (another pedal manufacturer) D3706", but I can't find any details on the web (at least any in English) on it. It's the same processor as used in that deadbeat pedal.
Reverb is an effect that needs to have a fair amount of processing power available, along with good algorithms, and that seems to be missing in this pedal. Whilst you can make good drive pedals cheaply, you can't get a decent reverb sound without spending a bit of money (and a great one costs a bit more).
My normal reverb pedal is a Boss RV-5, which is almost silent and had much better reverb sounds. It's not perfect, but it's good enough for live use and compact enough to fit on my cramped pedalboard. I could get a Strymon (or similar), but it would take up too much real estate and I'd have to lose two or three other pedals.
I've got a couple of other drive pedals arriving from Wish at some point, not Kmise ones, but similar price and style ones. These ones should be overdrives, not distortions.
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Originally Posted by Simon Barden
