Review: Digitech XP-300 Space Station
Video here.
This is a difficult pedal to write about. Full disclosure: I’ve wanted once since I first found out they existed, more than ten years ago. They say that good things come to those who wait, so…
First up - like many boutique or unusual pedals, this won’t be for everyone, and actually a lot of its sounds have since been emulated (intentionally or otherwise) by other pedal builders. The crazy glissando pitch glides? The Earthquaker Rainbow Machine. Arpeggios? Take your pick, from complex Linn sequencers to the EQD Arpanoid. Alien gurgles? Any half-decent ring mod. Shimmer or octave shifted reverb? The OBNE Dark Star, Strymon Blue Sky or any number of others. Reversed guitar signal? The new Hexe Revolver DX I believe has that function, or there’s the old trick of pushing the blend all the way up on a reverse delay and the repeats all the way down.
You get the idea.
The thing is though, the Space Station is all those boxes at once in one gloriously eccentric package. It tracks badly, sometimes it doesn’t do what you expect, the expression pedal is often completely useless and you have to have it in a separate loop so it doesn’t colour your tone… but I suspect owning one is sort of the eccentric pedal owner’s equivalent of owning an original Space Echo, even with the maintenance et cetera that is required.
Actually, I think the eccentric pedal owner’s equivalent of owning an original Space Echo is just to own a Space Echo, but never mind.
So in terms of settings, the most useful off-the-bat are the incredible warp settings, in particular #10, which allows you to ‘slow down’, ‘stop’ and then ‘reverse’ your signal in real time. Of course, it’s a trick of the light, but the effect is an interesting one, with enough unpredictability that despite the poor tracking, I’m already finding myself using it for lead parts.
Setting #2, a shimverb with fifths added, is particularly glorious, and a special shoutout has to go out to #22, an ‘alien’ bank sound that is sort of like a broken digital delay, and #28, a ‘sample/hold’ bank item that lets you control the speed of the random particles of arpeggiated noise using the expression pedal. Everything in the arp section past bank #30 is very much Rainbow Machine and Arpanoid territory, and like those pedals requires a bit of thought to use in a riff, but is definitely possible with more sparse figures, countermelodies and triplet patterns with rest beats in the bar.
In the first week after I got the pedal, I’d already written one song completely as a result of it, and rewritten some other parts. Like all the best pedals, it inspires creativity, even if the reality of its age and eccentricity means that it sometimes misbehaves when you come to play your ideas back using it. All in all, a pedal that deserves its legendary status.
