If you play electric guitar, at some point in your playing journey you will encounter pedals. Pedals allow you to distort your sound, adding layers of flavour and texture to your playing. But navigating the pedal world can be as tricky as learning to play the guitar itself (and just as time-consuming), which is why many new pedal heads grab something that covers a lot of bases as their first purchase. The NUX NME-3 Cerberus is one such guitar effect pedal. It pushes out high-quality tones at an affordable price. With the option to run your sound straight back into your amp or continue on an effects loop, this is also the perfect starter piece of kit, as it allows you to add pedals to your deck at a later date — easy as pie.
The Cerberus has a delay, modulation, distortion and drive all built into one slimline and hardy package. But it’s got a lot more than that. Each effect can be altered through switches and dials on the unit to find the kind of delay you want, the level of modulation or the specific feel of distortion. You could spend hours honing a sound and then, once you have the golden settings, you can save them! Saving them onto the pedal board allows you to switch between your saved presets with the click of a footswitch. It even saves all the dial positions so you don’t need to bend down and fiddle to get back to your other favourite setting. The pedal also has a boost, useful in the lineup to give the guitar a little more whammy when heading into solos or chorus sections.
Overall the NUX NME-3 Cerberus is a fantastic all-rounder starting place for those looking to get deep into pedal deck building. The casual connoisseur could grab this and stop there! It’s got everything you need to hit almost every base out there. At £249.00 on Andertons it is certainly cheaper than sourcing this quality level of pedal effects separately. Think about it, you’d need 5 pedals to make up for this 1, and there’d be no presets, you wouldn’t be able to plug in a waah pedal (which the Cerberus lets you do) and you would have to do a lot more hunting. A great set of features for the price. Everything a rocker needs to get by.