Hotone Ampero Control

These might be irrelevant to you, but to me they might be dealbreakers. I will only comment on negative aspects. The positives can be found on the 5-star comments.

1) Your expression pedal _might_ not work properly. I have a Thread-Light from Fender and can't get it callibrated. Multiple callibration attempts: sometimes it doesn't work, calibrate again, sometimes it only works on around 25% of the range of the pedal. The expression pedal works fine on other devices/setups.

2) The app is mediocre - but it does its job.
- Slow.
- Ugly. The icons are low-resolution images that look blurry. You can't tell what is a text input field or a button or a dropdown menu. Animations are sluggish and irrelevant.
- Overall, it feels unfinished. CH instead of "Channel", Data1 instead of "Controller", Data2 instead of "Value", etc.
- Complicated and unclear. You can't copy a bank for example, you have to manage templates and groups... stuff...
- I could only download it from their site. It is not opensource. I'm very privacy oriented so I installed it on an old phone.

3) Incomplete message type options. Note On/Off, PC and CC. Nothing else.

4) No other way of configuring the device besides the mobile app. App or nothing: by default it comes completely empty (some sane defaults would've been nice like in the FaderFox EC4)

5) The buttons a little loud (they are fine unless your microphone is very sensitive)

At first I thought there was some latency. Now I discovered that in "single" and "toggle" modes, the footswitches send their CC message when you release your foot - "momentary" mode works as expected. Read the manual.

So, the manual... there are two user manuals. The first and more available consists of 2 pages of irrelevant/incomplete information (blue with brown font) and that is what you get in the box. The real manual is accessible through the app's help section (maybe somewhere else as well but not immediate).

There has been NO firmware updates ever. I don't know what to make of that. Hotone has plenty of work to do.

If I had managed to get the expression pedal working, I might have kept it. The experience has been... underwhelming. In my case, I will spend the buck on a fancier controller.

The Ampero Control is a really small and inexpensive MIDI-controller with excellent build quality and an extremely wide range of capabilities. I'm using it to switch presets and effects in BIAS FX 2 and it works like a dream! Here are the pros and cons:

+ Relatively inexpensive
+ Fairly easy setup, works with basically anything with MIDI
+ Small and light = portable
+ Can send both PC and CC messages via MIDI, to any channel
+ Supports "single", "toggle", "momentary" and "hold" button methods
+ Powered by either USB or regular power
+ Possibility to use additional expression pedals
+ Good companion app that has intuitive and helpful features. Connects very well to the unit.
+ Excellent build quality. Buttons feel solid and they don't make too much noise when used.
+ Up to 100 switchable banks. I use these so that 1 bank = 1 song (because in each song, you probably need max 2-3 different sounds).

Cons:
- Small display only displays numbers, so it's possible to get lost if you have many presets and banks


For me, four buttons is the perfect number because I don't think anyone needs more when playing a singe song. And between songs, you can switch the bank to get another four different functions. So overall, I'm really happy that I got this and it's a permanent addition to my pedal board!