Coming hot on the heels of my recent Blues Driver rundown we have here another superb candidate for the ’Adjacent’ category. Of course ’Adjacent’ meaning in the ballpark of - not exact replication - often just synergetic happenstance. And the Buzzing Bugs BB04 is actually a unique overdrive circuit which did not really set out to replicate those dual genres - but whose profile just happens to fall into Blues Breaker and Blues Driver territory!
Controls - Volume, Gain, Tone, Body (Phat).
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I’m so excited to get my hands on this new Pedal Drop pedal. Readers will long have read on this blog that I was desperate to get my hand on an original 14-Leg Opamp-loaded OD-1 style overdrive, but with some additional tone-shaping mods also.
And that is exactly what Vitalli has done here. He’s been able to source NOS Motorola MC3403 14-Leg Opamp chips which are the exact equivalent specs of the original 14-Leg Raytheon Opamps - which have the same core designation number - while rather ...
February can often seem a rather odd month after the hustle and bustle of NAMM Show January - where a lot of new stuff always gets announced - while increasingly outside the NAMM schedule - but certainly in and around it! Projects delayed from the previous year often get released in January, but this year those kind of seem to be more spaced out - with some not feted to happen until March / April. February always seems slow compared to January, and that sometimes extends into March too before ...
It seems a long while ago now since I reviewed the V1 The Jack and The Kraken - respectively November 14th, and 21st of 2022. I had intended to tackle the remaining 3 Victory V1 pedals - The Copper, The Sheriff and The Duchess - not too long after that - but all kinds of other happenstances and priorities got in the way. So it seems a timely exercise to revisit the Victory V1 Series - which was / is a close collaboration between my good friend Adrian Thorpe and Victory Amps’ Martin Kidd.
It...
10 Years of Anniversary Tube Screamers - 35th, 40th, and 45th Editions. They aa seem to have been priced in and around $199 originally while current prices of older edition mint/new pedals can vary enormously.
Controls - Overdrive, Tone, Level / Balance.
I believe the internals are mostly the same, the 35th Edition has more protruding input, output and power jacks - and a very slightly different format. Interesting also how that one is labelled as TS-808 rather than the usual TS808 of ...
I had the v1.3 version of The Forest Song for over a year. That was already a fantastic candidate, while I had some issues with the Ge clipping mode back then - which suffered a little too much volume drop for my liking, and wasn’t quite as effusively harmonic as I know Germanium can deliver.
So Vitalii went back to the drawing board twice. Largely working on the ’Ge Clipping Challenge’ but also tweaking and refining the calibration of the other controls, voltage regulation etc. Readers ...
This is an incredibly exacting shrink-down of 2021’s Dumble-style Lightkeeper Preamp with the full flavour and all features fully intact - just in a significantly more compact and pedalboard-friendly enclosure.
I’m a little late to Vacuum Tube powered pedals - having dithered on the larger varieties by Kingsley and Tubesteader for quite a number of years. I once came pretty close to acquiring a Kingsley Minstrel V3 - but that was about it for a long while. Effectrode’s Tube pedals are cool ...
Both these pedals materialised around the same time - in and around the recent NAMM Show - although the Herculean Deluxe has not been officially launched yet (21st February) - but there is plenty of coverage of it online already.
I thought it made sense to cover off both of these in a single post - as they are kind of competitors to each other - each with its own unique elements. And the Herculean DLX contains that very rare mix of Dumble and Bluesbreaker.
I like the look / sound of ...
I’ve long been a fan of Mad Professor’s gain pedals - which of course mostly owe a lot to Björn Juhl - bar the Simble Overdrive (Dumble) by Lassi Ukkonen. Which by coincidence happened to be my very first Mad Professor pedal several years ago - and in fact my very first Dumble style overdrive - of which I have several now.
So the Simble was my first Mad Professor - and the Custom Stone Grey Distortion the most recent - alongside the 20th Anniversary Royal Blue Overdrive. The Royal Blue came...
Silktone’s Fuzz upgraded the Germanium Fuzz Face in several ways - giving it more range / variability and flexibility with its Bias Voltmeter Display, Cleanup control, and Raw voicing alternative. And here it’s doing similar to the old amp-like overdrive pedal - imbuing that also with smart new features.
The most innovative part of the pedal is the Strangle Boost / Voicing which introduces a Wah-like Inductor filter into the mix - which delivers heavily accentuated mids - or that typical ...