I used to have a Zoom 707 II. One day, I trod on the input jack. A little bit of soldering later, that was fixed, but I was quite shocked at the unit's fragility. A few months later, my cat peed on it. Sadly, that was it for this faithful little box of tricks, so I was in the market for something bigger and better, my hand having been forced by a cute little ball of fluff called Lucy.

I looked at various units before getting the ZOOM GFX-8. So, what influenced my decision?

Firstly, it is built for gigging. The chassis is steel and all the jacks are bolted to this chassis, not just soldered to the motherboard as in the old unit. This means that, if you stand on a jack by mistake, the jack plug breaks, not the socket. Secondly, it is splash-proof. Not water-proof, obviously, but, when your acoustic guitarist gets funky and knocks his rum and coke over in a fit of exuberance, all is not lost.

It has 160 preset patches and 80 user-definable patches. Of the presets, most are unuseable. Too harsh, too weird, too distorted. For this reason, most users put these boxes straight onto eBay, which is sad. Yes, it takes time to get to know it, yes there are hundreds of parameters to play with, but be patient... I would have preferred that ratio to be the other way round or even to have made it so that every patch could be edited. Sure, pre-load patches, but don't tie our hands next time, Zoom, OK? One downside of the unit is that the knobs and switches on the unit are multi-multi-function. This is confusing, to say the least. Happily, they provide a disc with an editor program on it. This is great. Plug the MIDI leads in and communication is instantaneous. The program sends changes on the fly, so you can hear exactly what you've just done in real time. Add to this the fact that if you select, say, a compressor, the labels on the controls on-screen change to the ones you'd expect to see on a top-range compressor. Change to flanger and the labels change on that unit. This makes editing very easy and very fast.

The amp models are fairly generic, but make a very good stab at emulating Fender, Marshall, Vox, Peavey, etc. You can also put your own OD/Dist/Fuzz or indeed any type of stomp box(es) into the Send/Return loop. If you really feel brave, you can make up 2 of your own custom amp simulations to taste. You have about 7 basic amp types to choose from (3 types of tube, 4 solid state if memory serves) and then you can mess with the various parameters and response curves to get the sound you want. This can only be done using the computer editor program and is (a) fiddly (b) confusing and (c) time-consuming. Once you have it down pat, it's a useful tool, though.

The various effects in the "Mod" section are well crafted and useful. Phaser, Flanger, Chorus, Wah, Trem and Vibrato, 3 sorts of Delay, and again, 2 custom settings, where you can select any 2 effects and combine them. Useful. Pitch shifter is quirky, however, and gets wildly out of tune as you take it to extremes.

There are several settings for the Rev module with, again, some combinations such as Delay+Hall, Chorus+Delay, along with ping-pong delay, auto-pan and several more. The sampler in this section is huge - up to 25 seconds! You have to record what you want to repeat on the fly - it "forgets" it if you change patch, for example. The sampler is controlled by the foot pedals. If this is enabled in the stored patch, you press the expression pedal fully and then press the record pedal. Press the stop pedal to stop recording. The patch will now auto-play if you have set it up that way or wait for you to press play if not. You can set it to loop over and over as well. Doing this live in a gig requires that you practise the techniques over and over again so you don't have to think too hard about it, otherwise you forget what it was you're supposed to be playing in the first place!

One really good feature is the Aux Input. Any source you put in here gets passed straight through the box, only being affected by the master volume control. This is great for jamming along to CDs etc when playing through headphones. I use it to take the line out from my Roland VG-88 while gigging.

I really think it's time Zoom got away from cheap and cheerful LED displays on their units. They are no use in bright sunlight and they are of limited utility when editing as they give you no clue as to what control does what. Before you know it, you've messed up your patch and the only way out is to escape and start again. They would do well to adopt a similar line to Roland on their VG-88 in this respect with an LCD display and a more logical, hierarchical menu structure. They haven't learned, though - their new G2.1u multi-FX pedal seems to have retained LEDs and they have reduced the number of patches available to boot. Ho hum...

The expression pedal can be set to alter just about any parameter you want. It can also be set to vary over a range of values for those parameters. Say you want pre-amp gain to vary from 50% to 78%? Simple - set the minimum to 50 and max to 78 and the job is done. You can't over- or under-shoot the required value. You can also switch effects on or off by selecting manual mode (press and hold the patch # decrease pedal for a couple of seconds). Now you can switch modules in and out as required.

Overall, this is a very good product with plenty of flexibility. The only negative points are the cheap and cheerful LED display and the confusion that can be engendered when trying to alter a patch using the controls on the unit itself. This only manifests itself when you are not using the computer to program the unit - using the computer program is intuitive and very fast. It's robust, sounds good and it's very affordable. Mine's a keeper.