Korg Pandora

Paul White nervously opens Pandora's box — and realises that instead of being the mythical source of demons and sorrows, it's just Korg's new compact guitar multi‑effects processor...

Pandora is a very simple multi‑effects unit aimed primarily at the guitarist who does a spot of home recording. Perhaps her most outstanding feature is her size, which is akin to a modest TV remote control. Powered either by twin AA cells (around eight hours operation) or an optional AC adaptor, Pandora is unusually styled with no printed legend whatsoever — other than the Korg Toneworks logo. The nine front panel buttons are embossed with relevant icons, and a tiny custom LCD display shows you which effects are active, what patch is currently in use, and in edit mode, what the parameter values and options are.

Inside The Box

Pandora has just 20 memory locations, all of which are filled with factory patches, and all of which may be overwritten or edited. There are 60 effect variations from which to choose, usually with just one editable parameter. Up to four effects, plus noise reduction, can be chained within a patch, and to make home practice more fun, an onboard tuner and metronome are included. A stereo mini‑jack aux input lets you mix a backing track with your playing for practice, and there's a bypass button at the end of the case.

The mono input is a high‑impedance, quarter‑inch jack, making it suitable for guitar, or the effects send of a multitracker or mixer. There's no input gain control, though, so you have to get your level right at source. The output is a stereo, quarter‑inch jack for use with headphones or as a stereo feed to a mixer. A Walkman‑style slide switch on the side of the case selects Off, Play or Edit mode, and the front panel buttons allow you to step through the effect types and adjust the parameters.

In Edit mode, eight 'blocks' are visible on the display: Drive, Tone, Mod, Amb (short for Ambience), Level, NR (noise reduction), Rename, and a symbol which stands for the Cabinet Resonator (see below). The currently selected block blinks, and the effect type currently used by that block is shown in the centre of the screen, with its numerical value directly below.

Drive provides a choice of 13 settings, ranging from clean compression through mild blues to downright nasty. This is followed by a simple 2‑band EQ in the Tone section. Mod offers 24 possible processes including chorus, flange, vibrato, pan, autowah and four variations of random, sample and hold filter‑type effects. Amb is where you find delay, reverb and pitch‑shifting, as well as some pitch‑shift/delay combinations. Unfortunately, the reverbs and pitch effects take up a lot of processing power, so you can't use them at the same time as the modulation effects.

The Cabinet Resonator is a type of amp simulator circuit, and four different versions are on offer, including one very resonant, peaky variant. Each patch can be named with up to six characters, and each has an independent noise reduction setting and output level.

In Use

Because there are so many different effects to choose from, Pandora's overall flexibility is rather more than you might imagine. It's probably fair to say, though, that the only non‑guitar playing users likely to choose Pandora are those who want to create guitar‑like sounds from their lead synths. You can still use the reverb and modulation effects with keyboards, vocals, and so on, but if this is all you want to do, there are probably more cost‑effective ways of spending your money.

I've played with a few effects units over the past few years and to me, this little monster sounds not unlike some of the simpler Zoom boxes. The guitar sounds are big and lively, but not entirely natural, while the modulation effects like to make their presence felt, rather than sitting demurely in the background. The impression is of a very 'produced' sound, which, to be fair, makes it very easy to create a patch that sounds as though it's come off a record. The mod effects and reverbs have a nice stereo spread to them, and the pitch‑shifters are useable, albeit with the lumpiness that besets all but the most expensive pitch‑shifters.

Ultimately, Pandora is designed for those players who don't want to spend time messing around with effects and who want to DI rather than mic an amp. It's easy to knock up a patch that's 'close enough', and for practice, the headphone outlet allows you to shred metal in the privacy of your own cranium. The only down side is that Pandora could end up down the back of the sofa with all those other remote control boxes!