How to buy a GEP?

A GEP is a unit that allows your guitar to have multiple effects like delay, chorus, distortion, etc. There are hundreds of brands and models of GEP's in the market, so in order to choose the best GEP, you have to consider how much money do you want to spend, what kind of music do you want to play, the number of effects that you want, and the year when that specific model in which you may be interested was released to the market.

I recently bought a GEP and I followed the next steps to buy it. First of all I checked that the brands were known (Roland, Digitech, Korg, Zoom, etc), because that warrants good quality in the products. After I studied the best brands or labels, I started looking for models and prices, I wanted the most sophisticated unit that I could afford. I was going to pay a maximum of 5000 pesos.

I like to play rock and alternative music, so I looked in the effects that the unit came with. I definitely wanted good of overdrives and distortions.

Then I consider the number of effects, the quality of the effects, the extra features and the most important, the year in which was released to the market, because there are units very old (about 5-10 years old), with that information I made the following chart in my mind:

Model      Brand or company       Number of effects      Year       Price (pesos)

GT-5                Roland                          28                      1997          $8,000

GT-3                Roland                          32                      1999          $5,000

GFX-8              Zoom                           69                      2000          $3,000

I definitely went for the Zoom GFX-8 because it was my best option, with 69 effects and 12 different distortions. And also because it was the cheaper one. Today I can say that I am very happy with my new GEP because I'm quite sure that I made a good analysis and that it was my very best option.

AN EXTRA TIP: Look for the price in different stores, in different cities and on the Internet online shops, that will make you have different options to choose where to buy your GEP.