Well THIS ought to be a short review.

I bought a Line 6 EX 1 Expression Pedal from Amazon.  It came with a short cable.  No manual, no nothing.  I’m wondering if what I got was a repack, where they left things out of the box… but it didn’t matter.  I didn’t need a manual.

Most expression pedals are basically volume pedals of a sort.  It uses a variable resistor (aka a potentiometer) to control voltage/signal.  It’s very similar to the volume knob on your guitar, but it’s controlled by a pedal instead of your fingers.

Some expression pedals have switch in the “toe” position.  Wah pedals often do.  The toe position is the fully forward position, while the heel position is fully backward.  Makes sense, right?  Expression pedals with a switch in the toe position have a cable that resembles a headphone cable.  But instead of left and right audio, one wire has the switch and the other has the pot.

This is a simpler pedal.  It came with a mono cable.  You can plug it into almost any Line 6 product that has a quarter inch input for an expression pedal.  I say “almost any” because I don’t know every single Line 6 product.  But all of the Line 6 products I know of will happily accept input from this pedal.

Pros

At $69, this was the cheapest expression pedal I could find that I was confident would work with my HX Stomp.  That wasn’t the greatest sentence, but I’m betting you understood it.  It does work.  You can assign the pedal to almost any parameter in any patch in the HX Stomp and it will control that function.  I’m more likely to simply use it as a volume pedal, but in some circumstances I might patch it into some other parameter.  It’s cool to have the option.  I think it’s fine for home use

Cons

The pedal isn’t the smoothest.  Parts of the pedal are cheap plastic.  The workmanship in some spots is sloppy.  The cable it comes with is flimsy, and probably about 2 feet long.  If I were doing a lot of gigs, I am not convinced the pedal would hold up very well.  It might, but it might not.  If you are hard on your gear, you might want to buy a more substantial pedal.  If you just want this for playing at home, it works fine.

Conclusion

The pedal itself isn’t much.  It’s what you can DO with the pedal that is cool.  Below is a video I made over on the budgetguitarist.com YouTube channel.  I’m glad I bought it – it’s neat!  But just be aware that it wasn’t built for heavy road use.