Drunk Beaver's 12th Pedal Drop - the Chernihiv Moon Metal Distortion combines the best of 2 legendary high gain pedals - the Marshall ShredMaster and Exar Moon Metal

The Marshall ShredMaster emerged in 1991/1992 as Marshall’s highest gain pedal to date - it’s its own thing really, while you could say it’s most closest to its JVM Amp Series. While the Series 3 Exar Metal Moon arrived a little later in circa 2001, and the Series 4 edition pictured in the above visual came out 3 years after that - with no major discernible difference besides a change in enclosure styling. I selected the latter version as it toned better with the Drunk Beaver PD12 enclosure!

Both pedals were proper high gain / Metal distortions which came with similar 5 control knobs - including having 3-Band EQ’s in common.

As usual, Vitalii has made some further improvements on each circuit inspiration. As per the ShredMaster there are no input/output buffers, while the Moon Metal EQ was more Scooped and therefore more classic Marshall sounding than the ShredMaster - with more treble and less gain in the output stage (effective treble amount with lower noise floor).

The main Gain Stage Opamp is now a JRC4580 type which has a better / richer breakup texture than the TL072 chip originally used in the ShredMaster and Moon Metal. 

The updated Clipping array consists of a Germanium AAP-153 Diode + 1N4005 + Red LED - for more headroom and more aggressive asymmetrical clipping compared to the original stock 1N4148’s. The Drunk Beaver PD12 Moon Metal is of course true bypass.

As before - this is a rapid prototyping project where only 20 of these will be available on the Drunk Beaver Reverb.com Store - priced at $150 - as soon as you see this article - in fact I always recommend you follow the Drunk Beaver store direct anyway to get notifications more quickly direct from there.

As always there is of course no time for a demo to be made (the knobs only just arrived!), so we will need to make use of a source pedal demo. While there aren’t many Moon Metal demos out there at all, and both that I could find are kind of ropey - in the absence of anything else, the below one is the best I could uncover. Just imagine that the Drunk Beaver Chernihiv Moon Metal sounds about 100% better than that!