HeadRush Flex Prime review – a small guitar processor with some big ideas

HeadRush Flex Prime review – a small guitar processor with some big ideas

$499/£459, headrushfx.com
Guitar players these days want the moon on a stick – and not just any old moon, but an extra-small one that they can pop into a shoulder bag and take on the bus. Well, if the moon is a multi-effects and amp modelling unit, it might just be the HeadRush Flex Prime.

READ MORE: Chaos Audio Stratus review – the ultimate compact multi-effects?

Promising the same sounds and key functions as the stage-hogging HeadRush Prime, the Flex model has squeezed itself into an enclosure that takes up no more room than four standard stompboxes. So the Prime’s array of 12 footswitches becomes three, the seven-inch touchscreen becomes four inches, and the full-size expression pedal on the right becomes… a bunk bed for a dormouse.
Some compromises are surely inevitable, then. But if the sounds of the effects, amplifiers and speaker cabs are up to standard, there’ll be little cause to complain at this price.
Image: Adam Gasson
What is the HeadRush Flex Prime for?
It’s for everything – that’s the point. Looking for a multi-effects processor to plug into your amplifier, with the ability to save dozens of different virtual pedalboards and flip between them with a single stomp? Want to gig or record with just a guitar and a single box that does the lot, including simulations of every amp you could possibly desire? Fancy capturing the sounds of your own hardware with a new, enhanced take on Kemper-style profiling? Actually that last one is a little complicated, as we’ll see in a bit, but it’s all here in one form or another.
Taking the design template of the old HeadRush MX5 (in fact it looks very nearly identical), the Flex Prime is about as small as you can go while still providing all the tricks a modern guitarist needs. That means you get access to a full library of effects, amps, cabs and impulse responses, a looper, a tuner, an effects loop for patching in your favourite real-life pedals, the option of MIDI control, and Wi-Fi for connecting to the tone-sharing HeadRush Cloud.
There’s also a USB-B port (the big square type) for copying files over from a PC or Mac, plus Bluetooth for playing along to all your Cliff Richard playlists on Spotify.
Image: Adam Gasson
Is the HeadRush Flex Prime easy to use?
Well… it is and it isn’t. The good news is that the principles of HeadRush’s interface are sound, and easily mastered after a few minutes of messing about – with maybe a quick dip into the early chapters of the 60-page manual to keep you on track. Scrolling through the 30 factory rigs is a lot of fun, and starting to build your own by adding pedals and amps to an empty screen is even better.
It’s easy enough to edit settings, to assign different functions to the three footswitches, and to choose what the expression pedal does. You can even turn a pedal on or off by tapping the teeny-tiny on-screen footswitch… but it quickly becomes clear that this titchiness is the Flex Prime’s biggest problem.
Most smartphones these days have a screen of somewhere between six and seven inches across the diagonal. If you’re used to that, working with this four-inch job can feel horribly cramped – and there are practical implications too. Want to change the EQ settings on an amp? You might find that the bass and treble controls aren’t even on the same screen, because they simply won’t fit.
Image: Adam Gasson
The size of the expression pedal could also be an issue for some, but the real annoyance comes when you want to try out HeadRush’s cloning tech and capture your own amps and/or pedals in virtual form. Because the unit… can’t do it. The Amp Cloner icon that you’ll find on the original Prime’s main menu screen is missing.
The issue is, presumably, that this thing just doesn’t have the inputs and outputs for a profiling setup. So the solution is to install the ReValver Amp Cloner app on your computer, go through the whole process there and then copy your files across. Unless you have a USB-B cable, that’s going to mean uploading the files to the HeadRush Cloud (or Dropbox) then using the browser on that fiddly little screen to locate them.
Does all that sound like a lot of hassle? It’s not so bad really, but it might well be enough to make you decide you’re happy to get by with HeadRush’s own sounds. Speaking of which…
Image: Adam Gasson
Does the HeadRush Flex Prime sound good?
Yes, it sounds pigging brilliant! I take back all those mean things I said in the previous section – hooray for the HeadRush Flex Prime!
As ever with digital devices of this kind, the show-offy factory presets lean towards the over-processed, but as a starting point they’re hugely impressive. And the stars of this show are, for the most part, the amps. There are 53 of them, ranging from tweed and black-panel combos to a whole host of metal-ready stacks inspired by the likes of Mesa/Boogie, Engl and Peavey.
The preset rigs do a decent job of covering the basics of what’s on offer: you get a few clean tones, some nice British crunch and – predictably, given the metallic bias of that amp array – lots of chuggy stuff. There are no gaps when switching from one rig to another, and you can choose whether to let reverbs and delays keep their decaying tails when they’re bypassed.
Image: Adam Gasson
Not all of the 100-odd effects are completely convincing: the rotary simulators are adequate at best, the shimmer reverb can sound dreadful, and there’s no harmonic tremolo. But the drives, distortions and fuzzes are generally good – yes, even the Klon – and there are plenty of atmospheric stereo delays to get lost in. You’ll find some cool synth sounds too, including a superb electric piano, although these have so much latency that you couldn’t really use them live.
For most people, adding profiles of their own kit probably won’t be worth the faff. But for what it’s worth, it works fine – and the SuperClone feature is particularly interesting. This allows you to capture one amp or pedal at a bunch of different gain settings and save them as a combined model, for a much more dynamic representation of its behaviour rather than just a single snapshot.
Pedals are easier to clone than amps because you don’t have to mic anything up (and in fact you can even go all-software and capture other brands’ emulations, which feels a wee bit naughty), but I was quite happy with the SuperClone of my Tone King 20th Anniversary Imperial combo. In theory you could use this feature to create an ungodly hybrid – say, a Fender Princeton that gradually morphs into an Orange Rockerverb as you crank it. I didn’t do this, for fear of tearing a hole in the fabric of space and time, but you’re welcome to try.
Image: Adam Gasson
Should I buy the HeadRush Flex Prime?
To be honest, my main takeaway from testing this unit is that it’s a great advert for a different one: the full-fat HeadRush Prime. Admittedly that’s almost twice the price, but it has everything that’s good about the Flex model and almost none of the drawbacks.
Still, HeadRush has done well to mitigate those shortcomings, basically by shunting a load of functionality off-device: copying clones from a PC is as simple as it realistically could be, and for real-time tone-tweaks on a proper screen there’s also a web-based editor that links directly over Wi-Fi.
If that’s OK with you – and if you’re as restricted for cash as you are for floor space – then there’s plenty of good stuff going on here.

HeadRush Flex Prime alternatives
HeadRush’s main rival here is probably the Neural DSP Nano Cortex (£499/$549), a ‘distilled’ version of its mighty Quad Cortex with the emphasis on captured amps rather than effects. But see also the Line 6 Helix LT (£749/$999), the Boss GT-1000CORE (£599/$599) and the stompable Kemper Profiler Player (£619/$729)… plus, down at the bargainy end of the street, the IK Multimedia Tonex Pedal (£349/$399).
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net