While I wait for mine to arrive - which I feel alas won’t happen this side of the new year as customs clearance is slow at the best of times - let alone over the festive season. In any case this Tube Amp style Multi-Drive has an incredible 7 milled aluminium Knobs - Volume | Gain | Bass | Mid | Treble | Resonance | Presence - and a further 5 toggle-switch option controls to take this where no compact Overdrive has been before!
I’ve been meaning to do a main story on this for a while, but was struggling to find the right angle - so I’m adding this very unique take on the Rat I guess here. The Buzztard has its LM308 OpAmp pushing a NPN Germanium Transistor for some fantastically harmonic distortion! There are 6 controls on this unit - Fuzz | Loud | Treble | Drive | Bass | Mids - on two rows and in regular and mini knob formats respectively.
I’ve already touched on Jackson Audio’s Belle Star Overdrive which I presumed to be an extrapolation and enhancement of the MOSFET Amp Boost mode on the Prism. Now we get the Amp Mode boost which is the diminished version of that, along with the Blossom Compressor - or just the Green Country Picking Mode from the Bloom - both significantly smaller enclosure pedals and with a price to match!
MXR continues to roll out really impressive mini pedals - this time offering the full Carbon Copy experience in that tiny enclosure. Prior to this the Ibanez Mini Analog Delay was the master of that marketplace - looks like the Mini Carbon is the new main contender now though
I’m delighted to see Walrus launch another dual footswitch Reverb - this time packed with multiple secondary features for the most compact of ambient soundscape machines. It does not have quite as many options as say the CBA Dark World, but its 3 modes and 3 selectable modulations are heavenly and it’s near half the price of that - goes straight onto the wishlist!
Spaceman Zak delivers another cool and unusual gain pedal - this time a sort of harmonic overdrive with 3 different types of filter for tone-shaping - single-pole, 2-pole and 2-pole resonant filters. You also have a Bass toggle for Boost, Flat, Cut, alongside 4 key knobs - Level, Drive, Initial (Dry/Wet) and Filter. I ordered the Black edition, pictured above is the Moonrock edition.
This was one of the launches around NAMM which didn’t get quite enough coverage - really cool combination of Chorus and Envelope Filtering in compact enclosure - with dual footswitches. Allows you to get some fairly unusual warmly tones - Paradox Effects is gradually building up a stellar reputation here - I really like their Terran Overdrive too - cool and unusual pedals!
One for the leftfield brigade possibly - the new AirTrash sort of Fuzz style pedal comes with blue volume knob - and red and yellow undefined parameter knobs - but which generally degrade and ’destroy’ your output signal further. Sold under the line ’make your guitar sound like absolute garbage’ - a great oddball noise-maker for those who like that sort of thing!
Teisco’s improperly monikered pedal is actually a Super Fuzz style Octave Fuzz pedal with switchable Octave. Otherwise it’s just the usual Tone, Volume, Gain affair - very simple and effective pedal, with lots of tone, but tending towards the thinner fuzz spectrum versus some of the fatter octave fuzzes out there - very reasonably priced too!
Zvex has now launched the 7th in its recent series of Vertical format pedals - picking off its classics one-by-one. The Instant Lo-Fi Junky is Zvex’s unique take on Chorus/Vibrato with 5-knobs to sculpt the tone against three different wave-shapes selected by 3-way toggle. The key dial here is the Compression/Lo-Fi control which sets your basic flavour - which you then tune with Volume, Tone, Speed and Depth.
Stefan Karlsson
