Although it has a number of slightly intimidating-looking controls, the Maxon AF-9 comes to life as soon as it’s plugged in.
The sliders for sensitivity and peak are wonderfully intuitive and the frequency range is controlled not by a pot, but by a two-way switch.
While at first this may seem a limitation, it frees up brain power to focus on the other controls. The two range options are high, 200Hz-4kHz and low, 100Hz-2kHz allowing for both guitar and bass (or drop-tunings) to be used.
There’s also a selector for high-pass, low-pass or tasty wah-style bandpass filtering.