Sunday, March 25, 2012

Power of Mini (Part 1)

Pandora Mini is really...mini. You can compare the size using the AA battery beside it as a reference. 
Compare to the previous Pandora, this is much smaller. It also runs on a single AA battery. Well, use alkaline batteries so that you don't always have to keep changing them. There is no more 4V adapter jack for Pandora Mini but you can still join it to a computer's USB port as a power source. 
Here's a summary for all its function. There are about 20 different types of amp voicing in this little white box. You also get to choose your 'cabinets' for a wider range of tone. There is a 3-band EQ for you to tweak the sound you want. However, I feel that the range of the EQ is quite limited. So the tone it produces is good enough for home practices but I am not sure if it is really suitable for gig-ing or performances. One of the reason is that Pandora Mini sounds terrible when it is joined to an amp. Trust me, I tried this on many amps and all sounded crappy. It sounds better when plugged into a mixer and blasted through a studio monitor.. OR even with these computer speakers:
It has quite a few drum rhythms in it as well. You now have a built-in metronome to practice your scaling and shredding. Quite neat, eh?
The cool thing about this Pandora Mini is that you can run 7 effects simultaneously. It has all the effects from delay, chorus, reverb, flanger and it even has a smart pitch shifter. Though you can't adjust the blend, the pitch shifting is quite accurate and good. Do take note that pitch shifting only works on single notes. Adjusting all the effects however will require quite a lot of patience since there aren't many buttons on it.

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