I will be back in Tokyo tomorrow, only to leave to NY for the second leg of my sabbatical; then back again to Tokyo for a mere day, only to leave immediately (on the 21st of April) to Chennai, India - where I will be meeting my 'estranged' sister, who has been lost now for some time, in various South American countries.

Of course, before I resume work again, there will still be a sabbatical stretch (leg 4) in Tokyo, from May 4th until the end of the month.

I had hoped I could squeeze Nagoya into all this (FLOPS 2008 is from April 14th to 16th), but that would certainly have been biting off more than I could chew.

A welcome trend: like several processors these days, more knobs seem to be appearing in place of buttons and menus, as is especially true for the ME-50 shown here. Note the per-effect stomp-pedals and their knobs, fashioned like a pedal board.

The only stomp-boxes I ever liked were the Boss OD-1 and (though I never owned one) the Tube-Screamer.

Of course, I am referring to overdrive here; all the other stuff - delays and chorus effects were another matter, but even then I rather liked the stomp-boxes compared to those nasty early guitar processors with their knob-less menu-and-mode-driven digital interfaces and displays.

This is why though I'd been in Japan for long enough (and this is where you can get almost any processor in existence. If you are a guitar enthusiast and have not discovered Ochanomizu yet, you should), I'd never sunk the cash for a processor.

However, a few days ago, for no apparent reason I found myself window-shopping at this guitar store in Shibuya, and even more surprising, a little later I found myself buying a guitar processor. I had never even asked to plug it in and see how it sounds. (Then as if to add one more tiny notch to the unexpectedness of the whole thing, I cycled home with the large box precariously half-stuffed into a bursting backpack)

It was the styling, the knobs, the 707-cockpit-like appeal of a very analog looking, metallic, clunky yet intuitive interface: meet the BOSS ME-50 Multiple Guitar Effects processor. Essentially a stomp-box pedal-board, only that it's all in one single unit, and no fussing with inter-pedal connecting cables and unwieldy power supplies. Construction is extremely rugged and the expression pedal feels great. The idea behind the interface (all knobs) is that you have a familiar, all-at-a-glance view of the settings on all the effects as you fiddle around for the sound you want. I imagine this is amazingly easier than any button-ridden processor, where each interface needs to be 'learned'.

Of course, the amp-modelling sucks (I'm sure it is fantastic and all that, it's just that amp modelling never appealed to me), but in a while I found great overdrive tones (the overdrive panel has an OD-1 mode) that suit me just fine. Oh, and delay is awesome: just like having a Boss Digital Delay built into a chunk of the unit; after just a few minutes of fiddling, I even figured out how to do the 'Slang' stunts (i.e., Jaco Pastorius' improvisations over a delay-looped 'rhythm track', as performed live in the track called 'Slang'). This is of course, meant to be a 'live' processor - that you plug into traditional amps, where most of the overdrive actually happens. Consequently, the amp-modelling is not the focus (which suits me fine). In the meantime, it sounds great through open-air headphones!