Valeton GP-5

This is the MVP of this year but no one seems aware of the potential of it yet.
Listen, either you don't have the budget for bigger units or you like cheap and good stuff. For both, you're in the correct spot.
Are you aware of this thing can play NAM profiles for 80 euros?
Do you know what it means?
It means you're not only getting a bluetooth pedal with amp models, you're buying the freakin player. The world is yours now, go crazy, go find every expensive unit's neural model and play it for free.
Get a 30€ wireless midi footswitch, the chococolate one and you have a 5 switch unit and the best part is, this pedal can be powered by the footswitch and if you throw a small powerbank to the chocolate footswitch, it can also power the valeton as well and voila...You have a wireless/powerless setup. Go further and buy the harley benton wireless guitar jack and a small expression pedal and for 200€ you have an endless options / wireless / power cord free / versatile as f. setup.
tonex my.....ss.

OK, I hadn't paid much attention to this pedal because I'm a dinosaur who doesn't know what neural modelling or IR loading is. Then I saw the Glenn Fricker review and was impressed. So I scrounged together not so many dollars and bought it.

OMG girlfriend! Straight out of the box using only the Valeton app and the pre-loaded patches, and I have a complete guitar rig of amps, cabs and pedals. In fact many guitar rigs, I would even say I have a plethora of guitar rigs, if I knew what a plethora was.

If there is a problem with the GP5 it lies in the extremely small form factor. I've got to invest another fistful of dollars for a midi controller to expand the functionality of the unit. I think I want a FRFR amp to maximise the sonic properties of the pedal. Well, I've never had a problem spending money on guitars and accessories in the past so I'm certain I'll overcome those two slight issues.

My conclusion: if you haven't already bought this pedal your life is worthless. Your children will not respect you; your wife will have an affair; and your cat will defecate on your favourite shirt. Your community will shun you and no house of worship will offer you shelter. You must rehabilitate yourself before it is too late for your own sake, I'm begging you.

Good news first: The ability to load IRs is cool. The main reason I bought this was to use an acoustic guitar IR to spice up the piezo in my PRS, and this worked! Just upload an IR with the app, add some EQ and compressor, and there you go with a usable acoustic sound.

I also liked how the footswitch can be configured to cycle between a set of presets ("songlist mode"). This allows me to cycle between the IR for the piezo, and a clean and a crunch sound for the magnetic pickups. Really nice, and other brands selling tiny modeling pedals should pay a close look here.

I also really liked the effects (but I may not be experienced enough to judge them since normally I play quite dry, with a tiny bit of reverb at most).

And the build quality is really excellent. Unbelievable at this price point, almost!

BUT...

... the first thing I noticed after plugging it in was the huge latency. It is also there in bypass, with all components disabled. It is there on both the analog and digital out. It feels almost like a slap-back delay. It's definitely longer than the 6ms or so that are advertised. It's a lot more latency even compared with my modeling amp from the 2000's I have been playing for decades now. I find that quite irritating.

In direct comparison with some plugins on my PC I also found that the pedal is lacking dynamics. All amps sound quite compressed, even the clean ones, even when everything else in the chain (except the cab) is disabled.

Further, most amp models sound harsh to me. In theory, I can EQ stuff out using the app, besides a ton of other adjustments. But after playing around with it a little I found that quite cumbersome.

Taken together: It's not for me. Great features, but the sound... not so much my taste. What a pity, since I was quite hyped about this pedal after watching all those overenthusiastic youtube videos.

I'm a singer/rhythm guitarist in a punk band, so to be honest this pedal is overkill for my needs, but I had a bit of spare money and wanted to see if this lives up to the hype. It does.

Positives: So many sounds in one tiny box, access to any number of amps, cabs and pedals. Basic sounds are pretty good and with a little tweaking can be highly personalised. The case feels very solid - the pedal is heavier than you expect. The delays and reverbs are very nice.

Negatives: The writing on the screen is a little difficult to see. The app, while intuitive, is not terribly easy to use (the sliders go all over the place) and I've had some problems with Bluetooth connection to my iPad, although not to my iPhone. Also, I really bought this pedal to add effects like chorus, reverb and delay - I already have the overdrive sounds I want from my Blues Driver - but I find the chorus on here to be a little weak and one dimensional. And of course, you only have the one switch, although that isn't actually a problem for me as I'm only going to be using two or three patches and can cycle between them.

That said, I've already set up a simple Marshall JCM800 patch and another one which emulates a Vox AC30, and both sound very, very good. Just for that, this pedal is worth the money. It won't be replacing my BD-2, but it is already sitting next to it on my pedalboard and I can't see it coming off for a long time.

The GP-5 is quite incredible. To think that say 10 years ago you'd have to pay $4000 for amp modeler and now less than a $100? We are truly living in a golden time for guitarists. The GP-5 factory settings are not great and almost seem to have been set up by a work experience kid? The volumes etc are all over the place? But if you spend the time to create your own tones it is superb. If you were really organized, you could play a gig with this pedal replacing most of your board and amp. Also perfect for the home recordist. Apart from the fact it has practise drum loops and a very good tuner you'd be crazy not to buy one just because!

Good little pedal that you can make do a lot. Basically a tuner that has tons of other uses too.
Initial presets are good, but the real value is customization. NAM captures and custom IR's is where the goodness is at.
In theory, you only need to set it up via app once and you are good to go.
A cheap midi controller will turn this little thing intu an universal beast, not just a one trick pony, essentially replacing a pedal board. I use it with M-vave Chocolate.
Will it replace my real amps? No. It sounds very much like any other digital equipment - digital. But it surely will be handy in tight spaces and places where I would not take my amp to.It sounds good with headphones too btw.
Did I mention it has a tuner too?

The only thing missing is when you are using custom amp captures, you cant use the IR loader. You have to have a capture with IR already baked in. IS it a huge deal+ Not really, because you can buy another one of these and use as IR loader only. Is it realiable? Who knows. I am couple of days in and it dropped the bluetooth connection to the phone a couple of times and hung on a profile once - the sound was going through, but I could not switch the profile to another nor adjust the settings (it needed to be restarted) other than that, it works great.

I got this for on my pedalboard to simulate rarely used pedals for its IR functionality when using headphones at home and for its NAM functionality.
Sadly the overal audio quality of this product, not just NAM or IR but even the build in stuff is just so noticeably low it was even affecting the overal mix when playing with others. No amount of adjusting all my old gear could fix this as the Gp5 was affecting the overal quality. And I don't mean personal preference I'm saying measurable quality. And without a true bypass even turning it off won't save you.
Put of the box it had the latest firmware, Wich constantly made it freeze during setup over Bluetooth, a known issue Wich they recommend a factory reset or a rollback to an older version. Both not being ideal.
Wich is a shame seeing the solid build quality and options.
Maybe it should try to do a bit less but at a useful quality?
I would only recommend this to a new player to fool around with presets to get an idea of what they might like at the cost of some tuner pedals.
Or someone needing a warmup tool pre-gig.
Other than that I can't imagine a useful scenario for the Gp5 and seeing I'm not a beginner or looking for a warmup tool mine has hit the second hand market before I finished typing this review.