Sacha Greuter's New Natural Selection Organic Overdrive Sounds as Good as it Looks

I’m a little late to the party for Greuter Audio, and it seems like an age since I first made Sacha’s acquaintance at Birmingham’s 2020 Guitar Show. My German pedal-maker friends Dan of DanDrive and Pete and Matthias of Demon Pedals have long been encouraging me to reach out to their mutual friend Sacha.

Readers will know that I juggle a lot of priorities simultaneously and I’ve just not got around to sampling the delightful Swiss-made precision pieces that make up the Greuter Audio range. I’ve long had my eye on two of Sacha’s finest - the Moonlight Germanium Fuzz Face, and Star Bender Germanium TB MKIII - 2022 looks likely for that exercise. While I will probably get the Natural Selection first - as I’m really impressed with what I’ve seen and heard so far.

Props to Gitarren Total (GT) for being my source on this - for non-German speakers you can just hit up Google Translate. The linked article elegantly and succinctly describes the key aspects of the pedal which I will transcribe and elaborate on as follows :

The Natural Selection is described as a natural and organic sounding overdrive which doesn’t colour your amp tone. Meaning this is essentially in the sort of Klone ballpark / Klone adjacent / transparent overdrive.

The tone-generation of the circuit comes from an unspecified JFET Transistor combining with a TL072 Opamp gain stage. The circuit has a charge pump too which doubles the internal voltage to 18 - for increased definition and better dynamics and headroom. 

You can select two different Diode Clipping arrangements - Asymmetrical Silicon, or a Complex Combination of Germanium and Silicon Diodes - which add more compression and fuzz-like breakup artefacts / characteristics.

All this is marshalled by a passive 3-Band EQ Tone Stack specially tuned towards the natural guitar frequency spectrum. The two demos out already sound fantastic (as below) - and as alluded to in the title I love the look of this pedal too - and the synaesthesia of what those connected graphic bubbles imply - echoing the organic nature of the pedal’s output.

These should be up for order on the Greuter Audio Webstore any day now - for the princely sum of CHF250 - which equates to around $270 | €240 | £205. 

I will for sure be hitting up Sacha in the new year to negotiate favourable terms on one of these.

Anyone else as impressed as me?