NUX ROCTARY FORCE 2-in-1 Rotary Speaker Simulator & Polyphonic Octave Guitar Effect Pedal True Bypass

I'm re-doing my pedal board (hoping to play more electric guitar), and wanted to switch things up. Needed some real estate back on my board, so sold my WHAT I THOUGHT was a really great roto, a double-wide format Leslie simulation by a major company. Figured I'd either buy the smaller version of their roto pedal, or go shopping for something new. After listening to, like, a MILLION video demos, I stumbled upon the NUX Roctary Pedal. NUX is a relatively unknown company, but builds a (sturdy and) way cool product, which plays cleaner (when you want it to) than everything else in the field. Oh, it gets dirty, but, it's just crystal clear when you need it to be. It also has an octave feature, which helps you get a pretty convincing organ sound, and is just kinda fun to play with. It also has a couple of cool "hidden features" detailed in the manual.

Great, inexpensive Leslie/rotary speaker simulator. For well below 1/2 the price of some of the other hi-end entries in this type of pedal (Neo, Strymon, GSI, etc) this unit does a very believable leslie simulation. I have owned/used many of those other aforementioned brands and while all very credible and realistic emulations, it's darn hard to beat one that sounds just as good for $130.00.

I got the Nux Roctary this afternoon, and so far, I really like it. The Leslie simulation sounds good and is EQ'd convincingly, the drive section pushes the front end in a pleasing way and has an interesting trick up it's sleeve, and the octave section works quite well. There's some octave latency (especially on the -1 octave section, as you'd expect) but it's not too bad. What makes it less useable as a performance feature is that it is turned on and off with a small slide switch on the top of the panel (or by turning the amount knobs up and down). Since it's going to live on my pedalboard, the prospect of contantly leaning down to enable/disable it was not all that attractive. The lower octave combined with the slow leslie effect makes for some great Chris Squire-sounding bass business that is tremendously fun (Roundabout, anyone?). The drive circuit has a bypass built into the knob...when it's turned all the way down, it's completely switched out of the circuit, and the associated level knob has no effect. Turn the drive knob up a bit, and its circuit kicks in and the level knob becomes active, allowing you to fine tune the level and amount of distortion between the two of them. A pretty clever bit of programming. The quality of distortion is OK, not knock-your-socks-off great but certainly good enough to spice up things and add that lovely grind to the sound that we've all come to love and expect from the Leslie experience. After playing with it (and having a blast) for a few hours, the octave switch thing was really starting to bother me (and I freely admit I can get pretty OCD about these kind of things) so I took the unit to my bench to have a look inside. It's nicely made, DSP based as you would expect, and with a bit of tracing the circuitry, I realized that I could mod the expression jack (allows you to remotely vary the Leslie speed, which I'll never use) and set it up to accept a footswitch to turn the octave section on and off (which I'll probably use a lot). I briefly considered adding another footswitch between the two already on the unit to control this, but this seemed to me like a better and less obtrusive mod. This works great, and makes the octaves much more useable for me. There's a few secondary software features...you can shut off the dry signal and leave just the octaves, change the Leslie ramp-up time to taste, and activate the Leslie Cabinet Simulation, which doesn't seem to do anything that I could notice. Probably an idea that didn't work out, and was shut off in the software of the unit (it happens). The settings for these features seem to be sticky (they stay set even if the unit is powered down, which is nice). I've got a couple other Leslie Sims, the Ventura Vibe (which does other good stuff in addition to Leslie sounds) and the Line 6 Tonecore one, but so far I'm diggin' the Roctary as my go-to Leslie sound, with the POG section being the icing on a delicious cake. It looks like Nux may have already discontinued these, as there are no direct links to it on their website.