Electro Harmonix B9 Organ Machine

First let me say that this has some great swirly Hammond sounds, really good fun. The flaws? Why no Leslie speed change switch? This is such an important part of a Hammond sound that to leave it out is criminal. The other big issue I had was with triggering, it's hard to get it to trigger consistently. Sort out these 2 issues and it would be a permanent addition to my pedalboard but for the meantime I'll carry on looking.

This could be a great pedal, but instead it's merely good. If we start with the good then the sound is great. It does a very very convincing organ sound by taking the guitar sound and processing it. It's difficult to work out what's going on inside the pedal but there's some compression, a little modulation and then it takes your guitar sound and spits out an organ sound. There are several variations of organ sound selectable by an indentured knob. At volume they all sound pretty similar and really just seem to change the EQ slightly. There is also a "click" setting which emulates the click when a Hammond key is pressed. You can vary the amount with a knob and it can be quite useful for a percussive sound in a funky setting. You can also add a chorus/flange type of modulation to give a Leslie-style wobble to your sound. When you put all these together with the excellent polyphonic tracking it's an excellent pedal to add organ-type sounds to a sond if you can only play guitar.

Now to the not-so-good. I'm always a little wary of EHX pedals as they never seem to had skimped a little on the build quality compared to top-level brands like Xotic or BOSS. However, you won't be using this pedal thatoften during a set so it will probably last as long as you keep it or until something even better comes along.

The worst thing is the silly way they have decide to deal with the output. There are two outputs. One is "dry" which always outputs a clean sound and the other is the effected sound which, when you press the pedal, brings the organ sound in. The silly thing is that they're BOTH ON AT THE SAME TIME. What I expected was that when you press the footswitch the output switches from the signal going through the guitar amp to send the organ signal to a PA. However, you get BOTH which means a horrible unaffected guitar signal goes to the PA when you're not using the organ sound. You end up having to use a clean sound on the guitar amp and just put everything through the guitar amp. I'm amazed they didn't think of this and at least put in some kind of option to let you choose how the routing works.

To summarise, as long as you can live with the silly switching, it's the most convincing organ sound I have heard yet from a guitar effects pedal. I like it.