If you own a Digitech RP355, keep reading, because this is about a feature that doesn’t exist on the RP250/255/350. If you don’t own an RP355, keep reading if you want to see what you’re missing.

The RP355 has a “stompbox mode” that you access by pressing the two rightmost footswitches at the same time. In this mode, the left footswitch is an on/off switch for distortion; the middle footswitch turns whatever modulation effect (such as pitch shifting, chorus, flange, rotary, vibrato, tremolo, etc.) is programmed into the patch on and off; and the rightmost footswitch turns delay on and off.


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This means that you can dramatically alter the sound of a patch with a single footpress. So you’ve got a patch with a long analog delay on it, for example, and you only want the delay for your solo. You go into stompbox mode, and you use the right footswitch to turn the delay on for the solo and off otherwise. And you can still use the footpedal to control delay time or level if you like. (If you’ve programmed the footpedal to control some aspect of one of those three things, the footpedal is inactive when the corresponding function is turned off in stompbox mode. So in this example, the footpedal would only alter delay time when the delay was turned on.)

Or let’s say you’ve got a patch with a rotary speaker effect. You control the speed of the rotary effect with the footpedal, and you use the middle footswitch in stompbox mode to turn off the speaker effect completely.

Or you’ve got a patch with a flanger effect on it, and you want to switch to a long delay on the choruses. You use the middle footswitch to turn off the flanger, and you use the footpedal to control delay level, bringing up the delay in the choruses and down in the verses.

This is unbelievably cool. It makes every patch in the RP that much more flexible and musical. I’m using this feature a lot lately. If you haven’t tried it yet, give it a try.