Product Review: Boss ME-50 Multi Effects Pedal – The Smorgasbord

Putting together a pedalboard of effects is not quick or cheap. You have to work out what effects you want and then decide among myriad vendors for each type of pedal before buying and trying. This can take months. Or longer.

Then again, you could just buy the Boss ME-50.

The ME-50 includes a wide variety of different effects in one fairly easy to use unit for under $300. Basically it’s a stompbox on steroids. What you get is 10 EQ presets, 22 distortion types, 11 modulation types, 11 delay types, and 6 expression pedal effects. This smorgasbord of effects also includes a compressor and noise gate as well as some more esoteric effects like a ring modulator, octave up/down, harmonizer, and acoustic simulator. As usual with Boss, it is built like a tank.

The good news is that while Boss has pretty much delivered the kitchen sink of effects pedals, it sounds surprisingly good. The disortions are decent and varied, if not a little raspy, which I find typical of most Boss boxes. While they don’t measure up to boutique units, they are quite acceptable and useable.

The modulation channel is also decent, giving you a wide tonal palette to play with including chorus, flanger, phaser, tremolo, Uni-Vibe and a rotary effect. Because of a lack of real estate you don’t get all the controls you would if you were to buy individual modulation stompboxes, but you can still coax out some respectable sounds.

The delay channel is the standard Boss offering and gives you plenty of options from short slap back to 2000ms. One big plus of this unit is the expression pedal. You can select from six different settings including a ring modulator which was a lot of fun and a really, really nice wah.

Boss also provides a number of preset tones that are actually quite good although navigating through them is a little cumbersome and something that may be a challenge in a live situation, especially if you want to use two or more different presets on the same song. Presets can be edited if you want to add your own although there are only 30 slots available so you would have to delete one of the factory presets to add one your own.

I had a lot of fun with this unit and it’s a great option if you want to go to rehearsal without dragging your main board along. With a headphone socket and controllable output, this unit is also an ideal practice buddy. Interestingly, spending some time with the ME-50 really helped me work out what effects I liked and used and which ones I didn’t. That was invaluable because from there I was able to research and confidently purchase the individual pedals I wanted for my own board. This alone saved me many hours and a lot of money buying and trying.

The main compromise of the ME-50 is that sometimes you might want to layer multiple effects, say chorus with tremolo or stack two types of distortion. Unfortunately you can't do this as you can only have one effect from each bank running at the same time. Also I’m not 100% convinced it is gig worthy although some players do use this very unit live including Fareed Haque from Garaj Mahal.

Overall, the Boss ME-50 gets two thumbs up from me – one for the variety of decent sounds provided and one for value. Above all, it’s especially useful for those that want to build their own pedalboard, but are undecided about what types of effects to purchase for it.