Line 6 POD Express
One of my regularly viewed and subscribed channels on YouTube is Studio Life and their excellent series called “Is It Shit”. Based in the UK, this series reviews plugins and some studio hardware and offers an opinion taking it account usability, effectiveness, quality and cost. While some over sensitive folks may find the name upsetting, the reviews are honest and the opinions valid for the presenters who actually know a lot about engineering and production. Meaning that unlike so many channels, they can actually walk the talk.
Why am I bringing this up? Because it was suggested that I review the Line 6 Pod Express. I must thank Andrew at Cosmo Music for making this possible.
Line 6 is, as you should know, a product family in the Yamaha Music pantheon. The company is well known for its stage ready Helix, HX Effects and HX Stomp units. For those of us of a certain tenure, we probably remember from some decades back, the original POD, a single unit box holding multiple effects. Some loved it, some did not but it certainly was popular and widely adopted.
The POD Express is the current entry iteration of the POD line for guitar or for bass. It is a lower cost of entry offering than the POD GO model and sells for $269 CAD MAP. I was provided a POD Express for Guitar for this review.
When I unboxed it, it made me think of a Zoom thing that was made of yellow and blue plastic that I bought (mistakenly) back in the mid nineties. It was a self contained unit with built in effects, amp sounds and the highest quality ¾ inch speaker available for a buck. It was, to coin a phrase, shit. The POD Express is made of plastic. Line 6 calls is polycarbonate. It’s plastic and feels about as durable as a free toy that one would get at one of those kiddie birthday party places where everything is filthy, the kids are rotten and the parents wish they were dead drunk. Not an auspicious start.
The little red box has seven amp sims, seven cabinet sims, seventeen effects and a looper. So there is a lot delivered in this very inexpensive unit.
It runs on either 3 AA batteries or an external power supply that is not included. Plug your guitar into the input to bring the power online and then the left footswitch activates the unit, and by this I mean EVERYTHING. While you do not have to have the amp sim, delay, reverb , modulation or distortion sections turned on by their knobs, there is no way without buying external foot switches to turn one area on or off and as there are only two footswitch ports, you could only control a maximum of two anyway.
There are dual outputs, that could be run to a PA, FRFR speaker or to an existing amplifier bearing in mind that you would then have to turn off the amp and cab sim in the unit unless you wanted amp/cab layered on amp/cab. Perhaps you do, that’s your call. There is also a ⅛” headphone jack. Output level for everything is controlled by a small rotary wheel on the side beside the headphone out that reminds me of the transistor radio volume control on the radio I got back in 1965.
The on/off footswitch and the tap tempo / tuner footswitch feel decent enough, but I remain fearful that a decent stomp would drive the switch through the plastic top and crush the entire case.
Each simulated amplifier has a position on the centre rotary switch and includes a default cabinet sound. These are not impulse responses, they are just sound treatments. Line 6 does document the goals of each amplifier and cabinet simulation. I would encourage a buyer to find combinations that appeal and not spend time worrying about how accurate they are, because in my opinion, they aren’t accurate. Not awful, but not accurate reproductions.
Each effect block uses a continuous knob to choose the effect in the block and how strong it is. There are no other parameters available to adjust.
The distortion block offers Boost, Overdrive, Distortion and Fuzz. The first three are quite good, but the fuzz one did not please me, but then I’m not a fuzz fan. The modulation block offers chorus, flanger, phaser and tremolo. None are bad, but the limited controls limit their usefulness as far as I am concerned. The delay options are analog, digital, tape and pong. Pong requires a stereo out. They’re ok, but I confess to being a delay snob and despite the very low cost of entry for the unit, I didn’t care for them. The only way to control the delay time is with the tap tempo switch and that’s pretty decent, but you have very limited control otherwise. The reverb block offers spring, hall, plate and space. None of them are particularly exciting but they hit their marks, albeit rather heavily.
You can control the amp settings for Gain, Bass, Treble and MId by holding down a small button marked Alt and then turning the appropriately labeled effect block knob.
There is a built in tuner, but to have it be useful you have to be looking top down at the device because the tuner uses the same LEDs as are around the amp selector knob.
There is a Mini USB port on the device, not for management or power but so you can use it as an audio interface to your computer. On macOS it uses Core Audio but if you have Windows you need to go to the Line 6 site and download their ASIO device driver for Windows. That’s not unique to this device, it’s actually pretty common for low end USB based interfaces. The USB port is also how you apply firmware updates.
The POD Express allows for the storage of up to 21 presets. Presets are accessed by use of both footswitches once you put the unit in preset mode. You’re guessing because there is no display to fully inform you of which preset you are using. I do like that Line 6 has placed the modulation, delay and reverb effects blocks after the preamp section
Playability
Getting going on this device takes under five minutes. It’s easy to use. I did most all my testing using headphones, because that is a perfect use case, someone who wants to practice without disturbing any one else. I did connect it to a Mac to try some recording and it was no better than any other Analog to Digital converter and as the sounds are to my ear, only ok. I certainly would not choose it for its interface capability.
The knobs are easy to turn but the amount of fine control is really limited. You can really only adjust the level of the effect, nothing else and I find this pretty lacklustre.
The sounds are ok I think. Not representative of what they purport to be but probably fair considering the total price point. You do get what you pay for.
Text is readable, and the switches good, but I remain certain that one misstep and I would crush the cheap plastic box. I didn’t invest the time to record example tones, because to be blunt, I don’t think that they are that good.
Wrapping Up
Is it shit? That’s an opinion, and I don’t think it’s a good option overall. It does ok on price. It’s pretty easy to use, but I believe that any committed player is going to hit the wall with it pretty quickly. As an alternative, albeit at twice the price which may be untenable, I would encourage saving up and spending on an IK Multimedia Tonex pedal. Way more capability and in my opinion, far better sounds. The Tonex is an actual modeller, and uses real cabinet IRs, and the amp sims are really quite good considering it is less than one quarter the cost of a Fender Tone Master modeller, or a Line 6 Helix. I try to find the salient value in anything that I review, and other than being cheap, I cannot find anything in this box to encourage me to recommend it. The people at Line 6 do make some terrific kit, but as far as I am concerned, this isn’t any of them.
If you want one, please consider going to Cosmo Music to get yours, or buy one online. This shop supports my work by helping me to obtain products for review. It is a real guitar store, with talented folks on hand to help.
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