Electro Harmonix B9 Organ Machine

This could be a great pedal, but instead it's merely good. If we start with the good then the sound is great. It does a very very convincing organ sound by taking the guitar sound and processing it. It's difficult to work out what's going on inside the pedal but there's some compression, a little modulation and then it takes your guitar sound and spits out an organ sound. There are several variations of organ sound selectable by an indentured knob. At volume they all sound pretty similar and really just seem to change the EQ slightly. There is also a "click" setting which emulates the click when a Hammond key is pressed. You can vary the amount with a knob and it can be quite useful for a percussive sound in a funky setting. You can also add a chorus/flange type of modulation to give a Leslie-style wobble to your sound. When you put all these together with the excellent polyphonic tracking it's an excellent pedal to add organ-type sounds to a sond if you can only play guitar.

Now to the not-so-good. I'm always a little wary of EHX pedals as they never seem to had skimped a little on the build quality compared to top-level brands like Xotic or BOSS. However, you won't be using this pedal thatoften during a set so it will probably last as long as you keep it or until something even better comes along.

The worst thing is the silly way they have decide to deal with the output. There are two outputs. One is "dry" which always outputs a clean sound and the other is the effected sound which, when you press the pedal, brings the organ sound in. The silly thing is that they're BOTH ON AT THE SAME TIME. What I expected was that when you press the footswitch the output switches from the signal going through the guitar amp to send the organ signal to a PA. However, you get BOTH which means a horrible unaffected guitar signal goes to the PA when you're not using the organ sound. You end up having to use a clean sound on the guitar amp and just put everything through the guitar amp. I'm amazed they didn't think of this and at least put in some kind of option to let you choose how the routing works.

To summarise, as long as you can live with the silly switching, it's the most convincing organ sound I have heard yet from a guitar effects pedal. I like it.

This can perform wonders, especially in some songs. I play in a three-piece band, and on quieter numbers where I play arpeggio, it can add a really nice, subtle pad.
Sometimes, though, it just sounds awful, doesn't cope with chords and certainly doesn't sound even remotely as good as some of the video reviews available. Perhaps it really can sound that good, but I've never got it to match them.
Also when hooked up to two amps, weird things happen with the controls which I can't adequately describe, but it's not an easy thing to use.
I would recommend it, but only as a pad/filler for small bands.

This, as with most electorao harmonix is well-built, straight forward, and fairly simple to use.
The Sound recreation of the different organs, is very good considering no midi or sampling is involved.

It's not something you'd use all the time during a gig, but for certain songs it works very nicely. It's not ideal for a power trio set up, but where two guitars are on stage, it works very nicely as an alternative backing.

The only issues I had with his hoping the adjustment and playing style to allow for the lack of sensitivity. It can be very loud and punchy or very soft, there's not much middle ground. This is the product products biggest letdown.