…by the way… I like your tiny pedal board! It is a bit bigger than mine because of the Polytune but it is also very small, thus transportable.
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That worked perfectly - thanks!!
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Always a pleasure!
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Jumping late on this thread, just wanted to thank you @Kim for posting and the story itself is very nice. Congrats!
Oh Master, please enlighten me with this noble truth, for I have not fully grasped the profound revelation that lies therein!
(Meaning: I still carry more stuff than I should…)
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…I understand you very well, believe me!
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@Kim,
I hereby dub thee “Master Kim, the Lean Mean Bulk Reducing Sound Machine”. You are henceforth the Gatekeeper of the Noble Art and Wisdom of Pedal Elimination for Sound Creation.
(It is much more noble than being called “Marie Kondo of gear reduction”, that’s for sure.)
@Ant is already following thy wondrous steps, Master.
Well, I am no Master of Marital Excuses for Gear Acquisition, sorry…
Considering the obvious fact that personal judgment and taste are not to be discussed here, I would say that in my limited interaction with the Mod Duo X so far, I am able to produce a very likeable result, which is by no means “perfect” or an absolute faithful reproduction of a beloved effect or set thereof.
Then, comparing Mod’s cost to that of the “great” pedalboards/multi-effects units, plus the fact that it has capabilities that the competition doesn’t, plus the new plugins released these past 6 months alone (and the great potential for more in the short- and mid-terms), its modest footprint, and the fact that it can be your only piece of gear on the road, I would say the investment is very much worth of one’s money.
(Of course, selling some gear helps get your point across…)
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That would be a great book “The Art of Marital Excuses for Gear Acquisition”
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Hi @Kim , nice story but I’m sure you know that there is nothing like a definitive pedalboard
Would you mind sharing your thoughts about pros and cons of hx stomp vs dwarf? Anything you miss about the line6 that is not in the dwarf?
Thank you
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@orange_gorilla
Yes, I’m happy to briefly share my experience with the HX Stomp vs. Dwarf… and also why I could easily decide for the Dwarf in the end. The difference is actually quite big from my point of view, not in terms of effects etc, but more the aura of the two devices and the motivation to use them.
You clearly notice that with the Stomp you have a proprietary device in front of you, in which everything is coordinated, easy to use, excellent menu navigation, etc… With the Stomp, everything is polished. If I were to compare the Stomp with German soccer, I would say that the Stomp is the Club Bayern Munich of multi-effects units: this club always wins, everything runs smoothly and at the highest level. On the other hand, this is also clearly boring…
With the Dwarf, you have the aura of open source. The plugins come from different sources, and are accordingly not coordinated with each other (except for what the system specifies), which can be seen, for example, in the different gain settings. In a soccer comparison, I would come to the Eintracht Frankfurt: The club is also called a “moody diva”. Sometimes the club is outstanding, sometimes it fails because of itself, sometimes it quarrels, sometimes they love each other. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes grotty. To win a game is not guaranteed, but possible at any time and when victory comes, it is usually spectacular. The club is not boring at all, but you don’t get a satisfaction guarantee either.
I once read a review of the Dwarf in which the author complained that the whole thing was not polished. He then added a screenshot showing the beta store in a place where as many plugins as possible could be seen without UI to prove his point. This guy definitely didn’t understand the Dwarf, or rather, he didn’t understand open source.
With the Stomp, I’ve actually always been able to get good results and it’s been exceptionally easy for me. You have dedicated effect paths that are only slightly modifiable, you can’t make any mistakes here. You get perfect plugins from one line, which can be combined without further ado. You almost always get something good out of it. Plug&Play and good (but also somehow somewhat boring) results.
The Dwarf, on the other hand, offers excitement: do your routing the way you want it. Wild wiring? No problem. The result can be terrible, but you designed it proudly yourself. You are part of a community of sometimes brilliant people who develop great plugins out of passion, not always usable, but extremely imaginative and implemented with the power of conviction. Everyone has an opinion, just as different as the plugins. With the Dwarf you get a landscape (not a line) of plugins, fast growing, with different qualities. A device that accompanies you, annoys you, pleases you, frustrates you, makes you happy… So, in any case, it’s not boring. The gain staging… Maybe the point that annoys me the most about the Dwarf. The background noise, which is hard to get a handle on. Until I realized that the noise can also occur between plugins… And I always tried to turn down the gain plugin, mostly without success…
If you are a pure user who doesn’t want to think much about effects and you want everything to run smoothly, you should take the polished Stomp. Then you won’t be happy with the Dwarf.
However, if you want to be creative, are a fan of experimentation and want to be surprised sometimes, by all means go for the Dwarf! I sometimes have sudden ideas about how to use or wire the effects and just try it out. I get results that I sometimes didn’t expect that way, completely by surprise. The best of my sounds have come with the Dwarf, not the Stomp. But it also took longer and sometimes cost me nerves. I’m more of a creative person, but I have to say that I come from an IT background, I like to tinker and test. I have never had so much fun with a device as with the Dwarf. And I love the open source approach and the community. So, my choice is clear: I take the Dwarf!
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Thanks for this. I am seriously going to link to this when people ask about the Dwarf or MOD in general.
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This is like a love letter @Kim 
Really nice to read and I think most of we, regardless if we are the stomp user or the Dwarf ones (if you allow me to use your nomenclature) I guess agree with what you state here.
Thank you so much for the opportunity of having you not only as a user, but also as a great community member! After all, all this feedback was to answer a feedback request from another community member
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bingo! beautiful summary, @Kim … and clearly states the “ecology” and “aesthetic” of MOD in general. it’s why i’ve found the MOD devices and community so compelling, right from the early DUO days!
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@Kim,
Couldn’t agree more with your assessment! And your football team comparison is EPIC!
As a musician, I am the National Team of San Marino!
(Hint here!)
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@Kim That’s actually a very fair and balanced explanation.
@orange_gorilla I went the exact opposite way than @Kim (returned the Dwarf, got the HX Stomp) but I do agree with his assessment. If you’re looking for a straight-up guitar FX unit HX Stomp is a lot more polished. It’s also more narrow. You can plug a bass or acoustic into it. You can use it with your voice or a synth, do some parallel processing, etc. but you can’t make it into a groove-box that will sequence drums for example - which is something that the Dwarf can provide.
I think I had more noise issues with the Dwarf compared with HX Stomp, but without head-to-head comparison, it would be unfair to state that for certain. Besides, this is very set-up dependant and if the source of the noise isn’t the unit itself, HX Stomp can be noisy as well.
HX Stomp has a curated selection of amps and effects modeled or inspired by real pieces of gear. This almost ensures that all of them sound great, and are well designed. The closed nature of the proprietary system makes it a lot easier to gain stage for example.
MOD Plugins are a lot more eclectic in nature, which has its flaws, like more difficult gain-staging or redundancy (many reverbs/fuzzes largely overlap in their function, etc.) but you can find some gems in the selection, not to mention plugins that most multi-fx units simply do not offer (entire synths, sequencers, CV stuff, etc.)
I decided to get HX Stomp because I’m a guitar player first and foremost. I’m also, currently, not a gigging musician, and since I am DAW-bound anyway, every decent PC + a DAW will be more powerful, and flexible than any hardware FX unit. However, if I wasn’t tied to my PC, Dwarf could theoretically allow me to replicate my desired performance workflow (mostly looped guitar + some “one-man-band stuff” like sequenced drums, some synths sprinkled in, etc.) inside one, cost-effective box, whereas now I’d have to buy some dedicated groove-box and perhaps a looper to pair with my HX stomp if I wanted to go DAW-less - this is where the main power of the Dwarf lies, and this is something I probably failed to convey in some of my past, overly critical posts (though I’d stand behind most of the statements made there - with some qualifiers and minus the dickishness).
If Dwarf, when I had it, had a proper IR support (updates suggest that it has it now), a few more, interesting, easy to use amps with pleasant UI, and a few more reverbs that aren’t redundant (which the recent addition of air windows verbs probably helped with, though spring reverb is really needed as well) I may have stuck with it because the amp modeling - while sometimes lacking in the UI department - wasn’t bad sonically.
To go back to @Kim’s preferred comparison, Helix amp modeling is like Robert Lewandowski from Bayern Munich - absolutely world-class - whereas Dwarf amp models are more like Rafael Santos Borré from Eintracht Frankfurt - not as renown but in the same league and certainly good enough for professional use 
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Thank you very much @Kim , I already was on the dwarf side and probably your answer was exactly what I wanted to hear. Now let’s wait for the dwarf
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@orange_gorilla: Just a few words regarding the HX Stomp from my point of view:
For a quite a long time I have been trying to achieve a nice clean (stereo) Fender/Jazzchorus-style Tone (playing a ES339). The problem is that we usually do our rehearsals with headphones, so I need a solution which directly goes to the PA. At the beginning I tried different preamps (HB Truetone, Palmer MK2, Sansamp, AMT F1, Analog Reußenzehn Blackface) in combination with different IRs (using Mooer Radar). Lastly I used the HX stomp quite a long time and since few months I replaced it with the Dwarf. With the Stomp I was quite satisfied, especially with the possibilities using the FX-Loops. But I didnt liked the stock presets at all (sound all kind of weird to my ears) and with a lot of trying and tweaking, using the jazzchorus model, I achieved a good sound clean sound, not better than the AMT (which I really like a lot), but with more versatile using the different modulation effects.
Then I bought the dwarf, and after 5 min of using it, I had by far a better sound than with all my other preamps/modeller I tried, including the Stomp. And I dont have noise issues. To my ears, the stomp was even a bit noisier.
Besides to that, the dwarf also replaced my EHX pitch fork which I used to play bass with a guitar. The MOD pitch shifter absolutely equals the EHX, in addition to that its less noisy. Ive used Keyboard and Vocals both in Stomp and Dwarf. Both do that quite well. But routing is much more flexible in the Dwarf. And another advantage of the dwarf: you can use synths, tone generators or sfz/sf2 sound samples.
To sum up: From my subjective view I really dont miss the stomp… perhaps the only advantage was the stereo FX loop.
Side note: Ive always used the same IRs from Cabir (Fender or Orange-Cab) which I really like a lot. For me they especially make a difference for distorted sounds compared to the stock IRs.
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You just blew your cover! Wait… I think I’ll try that…
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Why didn’t we think of that before?
Let’s scrap off the “Art of Marital Excuses for Gear Acquisition” and set forth the “Becoming a Guitar Illusionist for the Sake of Marital Peace.”
I can absolutely relate to @Florialdo’s quest.
For many years I’ve played guitar-cable-amp period. I just wanted and needed a nice clean tone, nothing else. Came the 2000s and digital modelling kicked in big time. At one point I was tired of hauling cement bricks, sold my beloved Fender tube head and a great hand-made cabinet I had and said “Ok, let’s go digital”. Then, one after the other, digital units came and went: Digitech, Vox, 4 different Boss/Roland (iuncluding the GT Pro), etc etc etc. One day I was offered the Holy Grail: Fractal Axe Fx. After weeks of trying and trying, I came to the conclusion a nice and simple clean tone would not come out of it. It was good, no question about it, but not worth the money for me. I didn’t need 1000 amp models, cabsims and effects, I needed just one – and it wasn’t there. Then someone showcased the Kemper to me: the “baddest motherf%$@#er” in town. I tested and tested, inserted new profiles, bought more profiles and… it was good, but not worth the money. I didn’t need 16 Million possible combinations and routings, I needed one that wasn’t there.
Then one day in 2008 I tested a solid state amp made in Italy – the SR Technologies Jam 150 – and the sound was sweeeeeeeeet, even for my solidbody guitar. So, right there I realised spending another $2000+ on the next baddest motherf***er in town was not going to cut it for me.
(More recently, I tested the Helix, Headrush, etc etc. All nice, but a good clean sound was nowhere to be found. So I went backwards and got myself a couple Yamaha units from the 2000s, the DG Stomp and two Magicstomps. Fantastic units.)
Then came the Mod X. My first attempt at a pedalboard was already much better than anything I’ve used since my Fender head. And on the second one, I’ve got the sound I wanted all along. Is it better than or equal to what my old amp-based rig was? No, but it’s very good. Is the clean tone I’ve got better than all of the units I tested before? Ooohhhh, yes! A fat sound, highly customisable, many routing possibilities, plenty of headroom, lots of automation options (and the X is good for on-the-fly adjustments), and I get synths and sequencers on top of that. Shiroverb is phenomenal – and I only use the free version.
Guitars take up 50 to 60% of the entire music market, if not more. Pedals, amps, cables, straps, picks, strings, tuners, and even plugins – a major chunk of the entire music business revolves around guitars. Yet, clean electric guitar is such a niche market that the digital folks didn’t really care to cater for them. They figured out clean guitar = jazz and that jazz = purists, so these people most likely want their tube amps and not DSP units. Which is not too far from reality, but still the working and/or performing musicians among us could use some good hardware in lieu of those bloody Roland Jazz Chorus amps that requirea forklift to be hauled around, or those boutique amps that cost $3000 and give you 12 watts on a good day and don’t even have an effects loop – that heresy of rock guitar amps!
Therefore, I hope I can follow Master @Kim’s path and become a MOD-only musician. If I can get close to the Yamaha sounds and am able to use its synth/sampler options effectively, this will likely happen.
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