I love Eventide pedals, so much so that I bought all four Factors. After using them as a home hobbyist for the past year or so, I have complied a list of annoyances that future buyers might consider before buying.
A few small things, a few bigger things…your mileage may vary.
#1 In And Outs. Guitar pedals generally adhere to the rule of “inputs on the right and outputs on the left.” This is the de facto industry standard, so most pedalboards are set up to accommodate right-to-left signal flow. Not so Eventide pedals. Factor inputs are on the back-left, and outputs on the back-right (though to be fair they are adjacent to one another). When running stereo, you end up with four wires crisscrossing on the back. Mostly its just unsightly, not a performance issue. I prefer a tidy pedalboard.
SOLUTION: Live with it. Take OCD medication.
#2 Midi Ports. The midi ports are on the right side of each Eventide pedal, a fact that didn’t register until I tried using them. Another OCD issue for me, I prefer having all the cables coming from the back so I can use as much horizontal space for pedals. But beyond appearances, the midi cables stick out about 1.5” from the right of each pedal, so if you have three or four Factors, you’ll eat up a precious ~6 inches of horizontal space to accommodate midi. If you try right-angle midi cables ($7.99 each), you’ll find that the midi ports are oriented such that the right-angle cables point *straight up* not down.
SOLUTION: You’ll need a wide pedal board to run several Factors (I bought the pedaltrain pro; $149 with soft case) because I assume you’ll not be happy, as I was, seeing right-angle midi cables pointing up like fountains at the Bellagio. If a new board is out of the question, one could also forego using midi.
#3 Midi Program Change. When the UPS man brought me my third Factor I was excited to set up the units in series. Combining Pitch, Mod, and Timefactor in series produces some truly astounding sonic results. With the pedals daisy chained via midi and some midi mapping, I dreamed I could call up patch 36 on the Space, and have patch 5.2 on the Timefactor, and patch 3.1 on the Modfactor instantly active as well. I call this “asynchronous program change” since the patch #s are not identical. Asynchronous program changes with three or more pedals is not possible with the Factors as far as I can tell. You can map asynchronous program change from pedal #1 to pedal #2, but pedal #2 will not pass along an asynchronous command to pedal #3 (even if pedal #2 has the proper midi mapping). To be fair, you can set up the pedals so that when patch #1 on pedal #1 is activated, you’ll get patch #1 on pedals 2 and 3 (I call this “synchronous program change” because all the patch numbers are the same). The absence of native asynchronous program change is a major disappointment to me. I don’t know if this is a problem with midi or with the way Eventide set it up, but I felt absolutely defeated when I ran into this brick wall.
SOLUTION: I am experimenting with a midi breakout box (Midi Solutions Quadra 4-Output Midi Thru Box; $49.95); we’ll see if that works.
#4 Power. Powering a pedalboard is exercise in frustration, especially for us OCD types. Few standards, not a lot of uniformity, cables and wires all over the place. Eventides are no exception to the pattern. The require a great deal of power and come with a large-ish wall wart. A standard power strip is not big enough to accommodate more than two Eventide wall warts. You’ll need at least 2 power strips ($8.31 each on Amazon) or you can try the Powersquid ($16.00) which looks like, well, a squid and can accommodate several wall worts with aplomb.
If you prefer a tidy pedalboard, you might consider an under-the-board power supply like the Eventide Powerfactor ($220). I had heard about this product on the boards, so was all set to purchase one to power my four Factors until I realized that it only provides power for **three** Factor pedals (?!).
SOLUTION. Live with it. Take OCD medication.
#5. Banks & Patches. Calling up a patch is at least a two-tap process, in most cases more. If you are a working musician and use a lot of different patches, prepare to do a lot of tap dancing. You must first select a bank, then a patch. You can navigate up the banks, but not down (?!). This means to go from bank 5 to bank 4, you have to go all the way around (as many as 50 banks!). To be fair, the Space seems to be the first pedal to address the “banks-and-patches” problem: of the 3 buttons on the front, the far right moves up patches (no banks, thank heaven!), the middle button moves down patches, and the far left activates the patch. Still a two-tap process, but an improvement over the other Factors.
SOLUTION: A tiny industry has been built up around Eventide Factors to make up for the inability to move up **and** down the banks. I purchased the Eventide Aux Switcher ($40 each depending on options from This1myne.com) so I can move up and down banks on my TF, MF, and PF. You can also invest in a full on midi switching set up from places like nicerackNYC.com (great gear porn there, guys).
#5-10 What’s Your Annoyance? I assume that Eventide fans out there have a long list of other issues to share. Would love hear about the problems, but more importantly I would like to hear the work arounds. Please share and please no flame wars.
Thanks Eventide for making amazing gear.
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