Headrush MX5 Special Edition Silver

An mx5... Only in silver

If you're reading this review you've probably already done your research on the various competitors in this section of the modelling/multi fx category so I'm not going to recap everything you've alresdy found out. Let's be honest, there's very little between most digital modellers these days, it's nearly harder to get a bad sound now than a good one so all opinions on which is better are highly subjective. I personally went with the mx5 for three reasons:

1) size- I'm currently trying to downsize all my gear to make load in and setup as easy as possible, so the mx5 ticks that box. However you do lose some footswitches which isn't ideal. Headrush make up for this in the newest update with 2 scenes per footswitch in your rig so you essentially have 6 full setups available in a single 'patch' or rig in Headrush parlance. To add to this I also got a small hotone ampero midi controller so I have 7 footswitches controlling various aspects of my sound. The midi controller and mx5 on a small 40cm pedalboard is significantly smaller than my previous setup and about half the weight, the mx5 itself is tiny but fully functional, even the expression pedal which I was wary of is excellent.

2) ease of use- Headrush have absolutey knocked the user interface out of the park on these products. Once you're familiar with their term rig/scene terms these could not be easier to use. In terms of editing the effects and amp parameters, they all come with preset options when you select each and you can edit away till you're happy with the sound. While they don't go as deep as some of their competitors when it comes to this kind of editing I personally think this is a blessing, you won't get lost in endless tweaking of minutiae convincing yourself it's actually making a different to your tone. Some players love this kind of detail and more power to them but I just want something that sounds great with 5 minutes of tweaking.

3) power- the quad core chip in this is extremely powerful. All 11 blocks can contain anything, and be moved anywhere in the chain. Want dual amps, with two amps in each chain, going into 2 cabs each (4 amps, 8 cabs) not problem. Just want a tube screamer going into a Fender, it's there. The only people that might, and I absolutely stress might, run into dsp problems are people running 11 separate and massive reverbs and delay for ambient sounds. I personally do use the Headrush for some ambient guitar tones and haven't encountered any issues. And to be fair, the aforementioned people looking for all the reverbs in the world simultaneously, you're alresdy using something from strymons catalogue so just run them into the Headrush and finish the tone there.

All in all I couldn't be happier with this purchase