SY-300 - And the Next Must-Have Pedal to Add to the SY-300 Is...

[Rhcole]

It's the Digitech Mosaic 12 string simulator pedal.

Hear me out on this.

First, I think there are two other must-haves: the EHX Mel9 and the Synth9. Also, honorable mention to the EHX Freeze pedal. The ___9 pedals add an array of sounds for processing by the SY-300 that for the first time turns it into the best 1/4" synth setup you can buy for love or money anywhere.

But, even with the addition of those two pedals the SY still has one glaring weakness that can't be avoided: it is terrible at octave up pitch-shifts. Absolutely ghastly.
Now, I've tried virtually every other pitch-shift 1/4" pedal on the market: Eventide Pitch Factor, Space, Strymon BlueSky, EHX Pitch Fork and HOG... everything.
For pure pitch-shifts, none of them are very good. Sorry Pitch Fork, I reviewed you well several years ago but you just don't cut it when complex intervals are played.

And Roland/Boss trails ALL OF THEM at 1/4" pitch-shifting for polyphonic shifts. Play a min 7th chord with an octave up in the SY-300 and you'll want to take it back to the store. Many players have.

The Mosaic is the best of the lot of current generation shifters. It gives you an octave up that decreases in volume with higher notes to cheaply fake a 12 string. It sounds really good and is inexpensive. IT ISN'T PERFECT, but it works GREAT with the SY-300. It adds a chimey metallic octave up that the SY can easily process to produce a whole new family of synth sounds.

The Mosaic and the SY-300 together can produce dozens of great sounding synth sounds, including much cleaner organ-type sounds.
Combine them with the Mel9 and Synth9 and you have yourself a modular synth setup that can rival standalone units.
Think of it as your own personal Eurorack. 

[chrish]

What happens when you plug the Mosaic into the ehx__ 9 pedals?;

[Elantric]

Boss Multi OverTone

[Rhcole]

Chrish,

That's a really smart question. I have the Mosaic AFTER the Synth9 before the Mel9 for simplicity in wiring (no splitter) and for device design reasons. The Synth9 has knee-bending bass, but EHX steered clear of octave-ups because they didn't want to play up to 1/4" pitch-shift weaknesses. The Mosaic therefore gives the Synth9 much-needed higher octaves that work great on most patches.

The Mel9 sounds absolutely exquisite with the Mosaic feeding into it. I don't think I will every be able to use the Mel9 without it again. FOR EXAMPLE, The Mel9 choirs suffer from too much low, booming male choir voices. EHX made a design mistake including the lower choir setting at all. With the Mosaic blended in, you get more female voices triggering with a resulting more balanced choral effect. The same holds true for most other settings, EHX was dodging higher pitches to avoid glitching.

HOWEVER, I think this is the rule for these three boxes together in series: you can use any 2 in combination, but avoid using all 3 at once, at least into the SY-300. The reason is that the sounds become a bit dodgy from so much digital processing. The latency gets higher and it starts to sound like digital soup. SO, any two together is terrific, avoid all at once.

[Rhcole]

Hmmm...

I may have been a bit rushed in concluding that you couldn't use all three boxes into the SY together with good results. As it turns out, with more skillful knob twiddling you can get some pretty amazing combinations.

Aside from synths, you can get enormous orchestral patches, way better than anything I've heard anywhere else except with MIDI. And try scraping a MIDI guitar string with a pick while thumping on the back of the neck to compare tracking...

...Although the pick-scraping thump orchestra sound isn't likely to be used much in my set list...