MusicRadar

The DigiTech iPB-10 innovatively locks an iPad in place as its controller.

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• Review

With its ultra-smooth touchscreen operation, Apple's iPad makes a pretty good control surface.

It enables you to drag onscreen icons around more quickly and easily than you can with the mouse-driven computer-based editing software available for certain hardware multi-FX units. And it's certainly faster than manipulating old-school physical controls.

This seems to have occurred to some bright spark in DigiTech's R&D department, as the company has introduced the iPB-10, a hardware multi-FX pedal that's not only controlled by an iPad, but also has a dock to hold it firmly in place as an integral part of the system for onstage, home or studio use.

The digital signal processing, consisting of two processors, is part of the hardware iPB-10 floor unit, while the iPad acts as a controller for it, utilising a free downloadable app, iPB-Nexus.

With Nexus you can design your own rig: a pedalboard consisting of up to 10 different pedals in any order, plus amp and cabinet if you want them - all selected from a choice of 87 different pedals, 54 amps and 26 cabinets. The iPB-10 has the capacity to store 100 of these pedalboards (20 banks of five presets) all recallable by footswitch and easily edited simply by swiping your finger across the iPad.

Equipped for plenty of usage scenarios, the iPB-10 has connections for a guitar amp, stereo headphones and also a stereo XLR connection to a mixer or PA.

Send and return jacks are provided both for an external stompbox chain and an external amp (the signal going to the amp's input and returning via its FX send). The provision of a USB socket also allows the unit to operate as a two-in two-out interface for computer recording.

In Use

The solidly built iPB-10 works with both iPad and iPad 2 - all you have to do is connect the device's 30-pin port to the iPB-10's flexibly mounted plug, sit it in the dock and lower the frame.

This instantly locks it securely in place, looking for all the world like it was always an integral part of the pedalboard. There's a treadle for controlling volume, wah or another assigned effect and 10 businesslike footswitches in two stepped rows of five.

The lower row selects the patches in the active bank while the upper row provides user-assigned switching for five of the pedals in the patch. In addition there are bank up and bank down footswitches, plus another pair (stomp and amp) to access the two external effects loops.

Editing is simple and can be carried out on the iPad in isolation, or when it is installed in the iPB-10. Several menus and pages can be brought up with a single finger tap and parameters can be edited simply by swiping a finger along the touchscreen.

The default display has graphics of the five footswitchable pedals plus the amp and cab visible with instant access to the virtual knobs, but you can quickly access another page for any other pedals in the chain.
A double tap on any pedal enlarges it for easier knob tweaking and changing one pedal for a different one of the same type is dead easy.

A tap on your compressor, for instance, brings up graphics of the three different compressor models available, and a further tap on any one of these substitutes it for the original.

Another page shows the whole signal chain and here you can assign pedals to footswitches, add and delete pedals and change their order in the chain as well as the position of the internal amp/cab (or external amp if connected) and the external stompbox loop.