Tone Report

TONE REPORTW E E K L Y

P L A Y ‘ T I L Y O U R F I N G E R S B L E E D

M A Y 1 5 T H , 2 0 1 5

100% analog signal path with unprecedented digital control.

This “true pitch” analog vibrato/chorus pedal features an all-analog signal path that can be dialed in to create limitless palette of vibrato and chorus. Since the control of the effect is digital, it opens up unprecedented effects and features that have never been heard or offered in analog stompboxes. chaseblissaudio.com


This “true pitch” analog vibrato/chorus pedal features an all-analog signal path that can be dialed in to create limitless palette of vibrato and chorus. Since the control of the effect is digital, it opens up unprecedented effects and features that have never been heard or offered in analog stompboxes. chaseblissaudio.com


This analog phaser pedal features an all-analog

signal path with smooth, vintage tones that harken

back to the 70’s while retaining the ability to get

plenty weird and psychadelic too. Since the control

of the effect is digital, it opens up unprecedented

effects and features that have never been heard

or offered in analog stompboxes. chaseblissaudio.com

ToneReport.com6

TABLE OF CONTENTS ISSUE 75 MAY 15TH

42 MOJO HAND FX EXTRA SPECIAL

OVERDRIVE 46 VFE PEDALS

BLUES KING OVERDRIVE 50 NEUNABER AUDIO EFFECTS

ECHELON MONO ECHO 52 ANALOG MAN

KING OF TONE

8

16 28 32

5246 50

42

8 TONE TALK LESS IS MORE: 6 SWEET

LOW-GAIN OVERDRIVES

16 INTERVIEW PREPARE FOR LAUNCH:

CHRIS VAN TASSEL OF J.ROCKETT AUDIO DESIGNS

28 DROOLWORTHY ANDY’S GO-TO MARSHALL

36 TONE TALK FROM THE PEDALBOARD

TO THE MIXING BOARD

8

9ToneReport.com

The battle over stage volume is an age-old and yet ever-present war that I wage with most of the sound guys in my life. But over time—though they seem inexplicably unable to comprehend that tube amps require a

decent amount of volume to sound best—I have learned to compromise. And that compromise has led me to a deep and profound love for low-gain overdrive pedals. In truth, I’ve had more low-gainers than any other kind of effect. And the longest tenured pedal in my humble collection? You guessed it—a low gain drive. There’s just something about a touch of grit that works really well with my style. And thank goodness that so many great builders have caught on to the trend. One look at all the available options on the market today and it seems abundantly clear that modern players like me can’t seem to get enough of them—and why not? Low gain drive pedals can be versatile and valuable tools in almost any pedal arsenal. With one stomp, you can add a bit of hair to your clean tone, or stack multiple low-gain drives together for increasing gain stages. If you’re lucky enough to get an amp dialed up to the point that the tubes are sweating a bit and still need some extra saturation, low gain is where it’s at. But with all the various choices out there right now, finding just the right overdrive pedal for you can be an arduous task—so here’s a quick rundown on a few standouts.

10 TONE TALK // Less is More: 6 Sweet Low-Gain Overdrives

PAUL COCHRANE TIMMY + Perfect for stackers + Great price + Killer EQ section The Timmy may be the “little brother” of creator Paul Cochrane’s original overdrive design, but its straightforward take on the innovative circuit has made it a stalwart of the low gain conversation. It actually has more gain than most people give it credit for, but as a low-gain stacker—it’s exceptional. Reason being, the Timmy features a unique pair of EQ controls that actually cut the bass and treble frequencies, allowing you to dial in the perfect amount of high and low end for your rig.

You can run it after a fuzz to cut the flub and add extra volume for leads. Or, put it before another drive or a dirty amp to drive the signal harder and tweak the tonal curve. Better yet, set the gain to taste and use it as a standalone drive pedal—that works really well, too.

As I mentioned, the Timmy has a surprising amount of gain, because most people describe it as a “transparent” overdrive, meaning it doesn’t impart a drastic EQ change when you turn it on. But a note from Paul Cochrane himself: “The Timmy only has that quality when it’s set to flat boosting. Turn the knobs and it’s no longer doing that. It’s meant to change things up some.”

SUBDECAY LIQUID SUNSHINE MKIII + Warm tone + Flexible + Awesome new look The Liquid Sunshine may be in its third iteration, but the idea is and has always been the same: to work with the gear you already use and make it sound more awesome. According to creator Brian Marshall, the Liquid Sunshine “won’t make your amplifier sound like something it’s not—it simply adds a little magic.”

The newest version of the Liquid Sunshine pays homage to its predecessors, but was redesigned to add a bit more gain and better control. And extra control is always good, but what I love most is the range of sounds you can get out of it. At lower gain, the clarity of the notes is remarkable. But if you wind it up, you’ll get a hint of tweed-inspired bite that’s warm and really natural sounding. The Liquid Sunshine wasn’t designed to get that tone, but I hear it in there. And it’s always tasty.

Of course, being a low gainer, the Liquid Sunshine stacks well with your other pedals, too, either pushing other pedals or being pushed. This is also true for your amplifier. Whether you want to use the Liquid Sunshine as a standalone drive or to push your amp over the edge, it’ll shine in either application.

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EMERSON EM-DRIVE + Crazy simple + Transparent + Great aesthetics If you’re looking for a simple overdrive pedal, it doesn’t get much simpler than the Emerson EM-Drive. With only two knobs—one for Volume and one for Gain—it delivers the most straightforward approach to low gain drive out there.

But don’t let the simplicity fool you, because the EM-Drive experience is innately satisfying—especially if you have a guitar and amp you already like. Why? Because this special little box from Emerson gives you the perfect amount of that “something extra” to take the sound you love and send it over the top. To get an idea of what it might sound like in your setup, imagine the best tone you’ve got and then add some extra body, volume, sustain and compression. Sounds pretty ideal, right? That’s the beauty of the EM-Drive. It’s transparent enough to let what’s already there come through, only with a little bit more.

On top of being a great tonal tool, the EM-Drive comes in a wide array of aesthetic options. You might have to hunt around for one that suits you just right, but the team at Emerson has dressed up the EM-Drive in some really great paintjobs that are sure to look sexy on your pedalboard.

BARBER GAIN CHANGER + Multiple voicings + Huge gain range + Great value If you spend much time on internet guitar forums, it’s likely that you’ve heard about the Gain Changer. It’s been a massive hit in the online community since its late 2012 release—and if you’ve played one, it’s easy to understand why.

The Gain Changer looks simple enough with standard Gain, Tone and Volume controls, but it also features two switches that give way to an impressive array of tones inside just one box. One of the switches controls the gain range and the other tweaks the midrange profile. On one side of the gain switch, you get the delicious tones of Barber’s LTD overdrive and on the other, the unLimiTeD distortion pedal. This option gives the Gain Changer the widest gain range of any pedal on this list, but the low gain textures are so good it had to be included.

The other toggle gives you a trio of EQ options—one flat, one scooped and one with a midrange boost that’s sure to satisfy even the Tube Screamer lovers out there.

Top all that off with Barber’s legendary quality and a price that’s hard to beat in the category and you might start accidentally calling the Gain Changer the Game Changer.

MXR IL TORINO OVERDRIVE + OD and Boost modes + Three-Band EQ + Great price The great thing about the MXR Il Tornio isn’t just that it’s a fantastic low-gain overdrive pedal. Nor is it the fact that it’s only the push of a button away from turning into a killer clean boost. No—in truth, it’s the EQ section where the Il Tornio really shines.

In a world where most pedalboard-friendly overdrive pedals only offer a knob or two for users to tweak and adjust the tonal focus, this awesome collaboration between the MXR Custom Shop and Italian pedal stregone Carlo Sorasio serves up a full complement of Treble, Middle and Bass controls. While this feature set may be lost on some players, others will find the Il Torino’s tone shaping capabilities absolutely invaluable. This doesn’t even take into account the deliciousness of the Il Torino’s tube-like MOSFET compression, because it is a killer sounding drive that’s well suited to push a slightly driven amp with its tremendous volume output, or stack along with other pedals for more gain.

That said, it’s likely the most limited gain range of this bunch, but for those moments when you just want to add a hint of drive, the expanded tonal controls make this a real winner—and at a bargain price, too.

MAD PROFESSOR SWEET HONEY OVERDRIVE + Touch Sensitivity + Unique Focus control + Great for “always on” There may not be an overdrive pedal on this list that feels more amp-like under your fingers than the Mad Professor Sweet Honey.

Similar to the other designs here, the SHOD was designed to push already driven amps to the breaking point or act as a dynamic standalone gain tone—but the sensitivity this thing has cannot be overstated. Much of it comes from the design of the Sweet Honey’s unique Focus control. The further you turn the knob to the right, the earlier the pedal distorts and the more treble you hear. But make no mistake—even with the gain and focus knobs nearly dimed, softer picking will yield a relatively mellower grind, where heavy downstrokes will be thoroughly distorted. So the amount of distortion, in a way, is still up to you and how much finesse you can play with. You’ll probably find this pedal to be one you can leave on all the time and use your pick attack and volume knob to adjust on the fly.

The Sweet Honey doesn’t have the same level of EQ control that some of these other contenders do, but it still stacks really well in front of other pedals—especially with another low gainer such as the Timmy.

12 TONE TALK // Less is More: 6 Sweet Low-Gain Overdrives

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F-6 OVERDRIVEPRESENTED BYBigLloyde

TONE REPORT: What’s the history of Rockett Audio? How did you get started? Had you been building and modding pedals prior to launching the company? CHRIS VAN TASSEL: I’ve known J. Rockett since he was three years old. We grew up together and we were kind of the only guitar players in our town. I took off and moved to California where I got into engineering and producing and had the chance to work in some of the top studios out in Hollywood. During that process I got to meet a ton of guitarists and we all seemed to have the same conversation: There were missing tools in the [effects] industry. They always wanted their pedals to do this and that. After years of hearing that same comment, we got to thinking that maybe we could create a circuit that answers these questions.

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J. Rockett

I did not have a background in electronics at all. So we ended up hiring a guy named Mark Stephenson. Mark helped with the design on the very first pedal we ever did, the Rockett Boost. And J. had a background in electronics and an interest, so I ran it by him and asked “Hey, do you want to try to build a few pedals?” That’s pretty much how things started. Along the way, J. taught himself to lay out circuit boards and all of the other aspects for designing a pedal and taking it into production. I was more of the guy who got to put my ear to it from my experience over the years. So he would send me the prototypes he was working on and I’d provide feedback. TR: Jumping into specifics, the Archer seems to have been a huge hit. What was the inspiration and how close is the circuit and the sound to the original Centaur? CVT: Well the inspiration was simply that so many people wanted that sound, and if you really wanted the true Klon Centaur sound, you had to pay $2,000 to get it. And of course everyone knows the story by now, that we were working with Bill Finnegan and we built the first 1,500 KTRs for him. However, during the process, we kind of

begged him to do it differently. We wanted to pay homage to the original Centaur and make it more affordable and more production friendly; basically, we wanted to price it so that people could afford it. It was a frustrating relationship because he’s just an impossible guy. It just didn’t work out in the end because he wanted everything, wouldn’t give in on anything, and you can’t invest in a relationship like that. That’s the short of it. We decided after seeing Mike Matthews and Electro-Harmonix come out with the Soul Food, and we saw all of these different Klon clones, knowing that they weren’t exact (close, but not exactly right), we decided that we might as well make this available. So we did exactly what we wanted Bill to do. We paid homage to the original Centaur and its look. And we made it affordable. It’s still well made and made in the USA. It’s smaller, and it’s made with parts that make it easier build. That’s how it came about, but it was really just to create that sound for people that can’t afford to pay $2,000 for a pedal. TR: Where do you stand on the whole idea of “magic diodes?” CVT: As much as I want to say that Bill’s

18 INTERVIEW // Prepare for Launch: An Interview with Chris Van Tassel of J.Rockett Audio Designs

smoking crack with regard to the sound of diodes, he was absolutely right. I don’t know if you know Michael Britt, he’s the guitarist for the band Lonestar. He’s kind of a tweaker and a good buddy of mine. We decided one day that we would take the Archer and we would test out the real “supposedly unknown” diodes (which we had) against probably about 50 other diodes. And I’ll tell you, it was a dramatic difference on all of them. And if you didn’t have a Klon Centaur for a side by side comparison, you were going to miss some of the subtleties. Overall, I’d estimate we’ve tested hundreds of diodes. Even yesterday, as we were working on the gold version of the Archer with Pro Guitar Shop, we wanted to test it against a gold Klon. And the gold and silver Klons were different. So yes, the diodes really do make all of the difference. With different diodes you can get close. But with the right ones, it’s that extra 5 percent of the touch, the sound, and the feel. TR: The Archer is the first in your new Tour Series line. What else is coming in that line and when can we expect to see it? CVT: We’re hoping that they all trickle out

this year. The next one to be released is the Boing. It’s just a simple, one knob, spring reverb. What we are going with in the Tour Series is to provide guitarists with affordable products—which doesn’t mean they are cheap, we’re just making less money on them—that are small, rugged, and built for touring. They’re the essential sounds. There is nothing crazy about them. They just sound great. For the Boing, we spent a lot of time building circuits around it so that it can have that spring bounce, and brightness of an old school spring reverb. To follow, we have a whole bunch of stuff. We have a Phase 45 and Uni-Vibe all in one. We have a compressor, a tap tempo delay, a pedal we had at NAMM called the Monkey Man—it’s the sound of the Rolling Stones’s “Monkey Man” in a pedal—that ‘57 tweed sound with a built in reverb. It’s really cool. And then to bring up Michael Britt again, he had Keith Urban’s Dumble ODS for the weekend. I said, while you have it, let’s see if we can match it with a pedal. So we tweaked and tweaked and tweaked, and we got this pedal 95 percent of the way spot on. And then we made one last circuit change, and that was it! This thing is just incredible—in

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my opinion, it’s the best overdrive pedal I’ve ever played. It’s called the Dude! I wish we could go the full Big Lebowski, but we can’t, due to licensing fees. I can’t wait to get this one out there. But we’re so overdrive heavy as a company that we’re trying to get some other pedals out there first. The Dude will be later on down the road. We’re also bringing out a buffer called the SOS. It’s a little square - the size of an Archer cut in half. It will have one little trim pot that is below the surface of the face, and then an input and an output. You plug in, and it just cleans up and enhances your sound. It’s just a nice transistor buffer that won’t interfere with wah and fuzz pedals and just takes the blanket off of your sound. It will be nice and cheap, probably $79. TR: So it’s a buffer that is friendly when placed before a vintage fuzz?

CVT: Exactly! TR: I can’t wait to check it out. CVT: It’s a cool pedal. It’s the buffer from the original Rockett Boost and we’ve always wanted to get it in the mix. It’s just a matter of timing. We made the mistake with the Mark Sampson pedals to release them all at once. That was a nightmare. So now we’re

trying to do one at a time and make sure we have a solid supply of each before we go too nuts. And we try to have a few surprises as well; the special edition Gold Archer that will be a Pro Guitar Shop exclusive is one that’s coming soon. That one will have the same diodes that were in the Gold Klon Centaurs. That’s going to be very cool. Then we’re going to do a standalone version

of just the boost section of the Archer. And all of these

pedals will be called Archers. And then we’re

also doing a hand-wired version. If J. would just work 24 hours a day we’d all be happy (laughs). TR: Jumping back to

the Mark Sampson pedals. How did you

guys come to partner with him?

CVT: I’ve known Mark for many years. You’ll notice that we also are helping to re-launch SIB. Rick Campbell and Mark Sampson years ago designed SMF Amps. I think it stood for Sonic Machine Factory. It was a production-friendly amp that could be built and sold for a reasonable price. They could actually build them quickly, but the company didn’t do that well. The way it came about is that I was at Killer Vintage in St. Louis. Dave Henson, the owner is a friend of mine and we were hanging out. Dave had an amp that Mark had built for him and it had this amazing


stereo Magnatone-style vibe built into it. And it was just the most amazing sound I’d ever heard and I couldn’t stop playing it. And so I decided to talk to Mark to see if he could put it in a pedal. So we approached him with that and it took about a year, but that’s how the Revolver came about. I don’t know if you played it, but if you put it in stereo it will literally make you sick. TR: The Max and High Top also very cool. Tell me a little about them. CVT: The High Top is an actual top boost circuit but built with transistors in place of the tubes. It even has the same input design as a top boost. As a result, it will nail that old Beatles sound, but it’s happiest with a lower volume input. Active pickups and humbuckers can make it get fizzy. The Max is sort of a simplified version of that sound. I actually sent it to a guy name John Willis and he’s using it on bass. It sounds great on guitar and bass (or even keys) because it preserves the low end. The reason we called it the Max is because it just maxes out all of your frequencies. It’s not meant as a clean boost. It expands your top end, your low end, and just gives a nice, rich signal. TR: You’ve also worked with Paul Trombetta on the WTF. How did that come about and how close is the WTF to the Mini Bone? CVT: It’s pretty much the same circuit. We made a few tweaks on the treble switch, I don’t know what to call it, sort of a cut switch. Paul had it set a little more subtle, we tweaked it so that you could put it in front of an AC30 and not get that nastiness. You can

set it darker for bright amps and brighter for dark amps. The only other difference is that we added the second Volume control so that you can change volume settings but keep the gain structure intact. And we made some minor changes to the EQ. Other than that, it’s the same pedal. It came about because a buddy had a Mini Bone and I loved it, and I universally hate fuzzes for what I do. And the Mini Bone, I couldn’t stop playing it. So I contacted Paul and said “we know nothing about fuzzes, because we hate them. Do you want to do a design for us?” And he was game. And you know it has more going on than just fuzz. If you back off on the WTF knob it’s more of a smooth Rat-style drive. And then as you crank it up, it adds that trombone artifact and gets fuzzier and wilder. That’s why we call it a fuzz for people who don’t like fuzz. TR: I can see that, but I’m a fuzz junky, and I loved it the way I love the Fuzz Factory and some of the FuzzHugger stuff. There are so many sounds in there!

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CVT: I hear that. I was just a child of the ‘80s, so I grew up in an era where my technique isn’t suited to fuzz. Maybe it’s less that I don’t like fuzz and more that fuzz doesn’t like me (laughs). TR: I lucked out to come of age in the early to mid ‘90s. Fancy racks weren’t as popular, pawnshop guitars and pedals were coming back, and you didn’t need much in the way of technique. I didn’t have to learn to tap or sweep pick. I just needed some basic chords, a phaser, and a dirt pedal. CVT: I was in Hollywood in the ‘80s. If you couldn’t do some sort of Yngwie Malmsteen thing, nobody cared who you were. I always joke and say I wish I would have been born ten years earlier. Eddie Van Halen was my biggest influence, and I wouldn’t change that for anything. But it wasn’t until later when I started listening to Beck, Page, and Hendrix. And it’s strange, but for me, the blues is the hardest thing for me to play. But I embrace my early years. You know, Michael Britt is a country player, but he’s a great blues player too. And just for fun, I pull out a Floyd Rose-equipped guitar and do a bunch of dive bombs for him. He hates it! TR: Tell me about the Lemon-Aid. It has a lot of function and flexibility for a boost. CVT: I don’t want to say it dumbs down the Rockett Boost, but the Lemon-Aid is based on it, which is the first pedal we ever made. We just came out with a version that didn’t have the switchable buffer and is more affordable to build. It’s an interesting circuit, because it’s based off of an old RCA radio

circuit. And so it’s as clean as a whistle. You can use it to push the front end of an amp, but in itself, it’s just pristine. A lot of guys have discovered it as their Swiss Army knife and secret weapon. I find it to really enhance your harmonic content. When you engage it, even though you’re not increasing the volume, it kind of organizes your notes and frequencies better and adds a ton of sustain. It just adds this sheen on top and makes everything sound better. That’s why it’s called the Lemon-Aid. If you look at how it’s spelled, it’s not like the drink. It’s like if your car was a lemon, this is the aid. Of if you’re amp is a lemon... A lot of people don’t catch that. It’s a sound enhancer, how about that? TR: Which Rockett pedal are you most proud of and why?

CVT: I would say the Blue Note. It’s because with that pedal, I spent personally about a year personally just refining the low end. And it’s not as simple as just tweaking the low end, it’s about changing a bunch of parts. It’s also important because it’s a pedal we got so many requests about. People were always telling us that they had an amp that they loved, but that they needed a pedal that could give a little more of a goose, but without sounding like they just stepped on a pedal. Things like Tube Screamers, where if you step on them, you know, because all of your lows and highs have gone away. You can set [the Blue Note] to be so transparent that you can’t tell when you switch it off and on. What I like though, is to be able to play my guitar with the pedal engaged, and when I dig into the strings, that’s when the amp breaks up. It makes it easier to control that


Chris Van Tassel

dynamic. It took forever to dial it in, but the Blue Note does that perfectly. TR: It sounds like it behaves almost like a Hotcake, and could be great for Top boost Voxes and other finicky amps. CVT: The Hotcake is a little more flattened on the top end, where the Blue Note is a little more open with more of a compression and less gain if that makes any sense. The pedal that we designed to really work with Vox amps is the Chicken Soup and the Guthrie Trapp. They kind of do that same thing that the Hotcake does. TR: Aside from the Tour Series and the various Archers, what else is on the horizon? CVT: I had a long conversation with Allan Holdsworth a few weeks back. I was talking to Tom Bukovac—he’s a great session player and owns a shop called Second Gear. It’s basically a consignment shop and a hangout for local musicians. I was down there, and I saw that they had on a rack in the back, one of Allan’s harness devices. It’s kind of like an attenuator that Allan actually built himself a few years ago. He built like 100 of them and they had it on sale for $75. I had to use it just because of the history. So I bought it, and was telling Allan about it. He said it was kind of an older iteration, but it opened up a conversation about attenuators. He’s a brilliant guy, and he knows electronics well. He hates resistors, so he developed this attenuation system based on just wire itself. I certainly can’t explain the technology the way he does. But if we could develop an attenuator where you connect it to a 100-

watt Marshall and it doesn’t give all the annoying artifacts that a typical attenuator adds, that would be amazing. And if we could combine that with a good speaker simulator output, that bridges the amp and pedal worlds and allows you to compete with the Kempers and Fractals of the world—so Allan is actually working on a design to create that for us. And it will have a sort of idiot-proof impedance, where you just plug your speaker cabinet in and it will just adapt. And then he has this device that he created years ago. He told me people are always asking him how he keeps his rig quiet. He created this thing that is sort of an isolated transformer. He calls it the Silencer. He puts it anywhere in his signal chain, and it eliminates all of the noise. We are working with him on that as well. We’re trying to branch out a little beyond pedals—creating other devices to help make guitarists’ lives a little better and/or easier. My philosophy is pretty much, “if it doesn’t knock my socks off, there’s no reason to release it.”

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J. R

OC

KETT

AUDIO DESIGNS

...IS ON YOUR BOARD?UZZ

MADE IN USA

28 DROOLWORTHY // Andy’s Go-to Marshall

This is my absolute favorite Marshall amp, a 1972 100 Watt Super Lead. It’s one of the lucky ones that hasn’t been molested over the years with extra preamp tubes or a master volume and it is the last year before Marshall switched to PCB. You can see it has the famous mustard caps on the board and besides some new filter caps, this baby is stock. This is one of those amps that you don’t need an overdrive pedal with, just use your guitar volume to go from clean to dirty. When you hit the sweet spot on the volume, that Jimmy Page “honk” just comes to life and I feel I can put an end to chasing the Page tone after many years. The inputs can be linked together to help fatten up the tone but I usually use the bright channel around 6 which isn’t affected by the bright cap at that point. My favorite settings are: presence 4, bass 0, midrange and treble at 10. I’ve never heard a 100 watter as meaty as this one before. I drool every time I look at it and it looks pretty slick atop a custom 4x12 Mojotone cab loaded with their British Vintage Series 60w speakers.


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www.dod.com

DIRTYWORK

36

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There’s something to be said about real gear workhorses, because not all pedals are created equal. Sure, you may be busting heads in the garage, but when the time comes to disseminate your head-busting riffs to the general population,

many pedals simply aren’t going to get the job done unless you hook everything up, dragging out your cable-and-mic milk crate from the closet. What a hassle! Wouldn’t it be much easier to use one set of tools to do another’s job? Wouldn’t it be nice to not have to fumble about with interfaces, plugins, switching pedals in and out and the like? Help us help you. We want you to step your studio game up, so here are our picks to facilitate the finest woodshed-to-studio transfers.

STONE DEAF FX PDF-1/MAESTRO MPF-1 The first piece of equipment on this list isn’t so much a rugged multi-faceted studio warhorse as it is a studio’s set of salt and pepper shakers. The PDF-1 from Stone Deaf FX is that pair of ubiquitous flavor enhancers, as it’s a piece of gear that sounds good with literally anything running through it—synths, drums, vocals, you name it. In its day, studio musicians all over the country revered the pedal that the PDF-1 is based on—the Maestro MPF-1 Parametric Filter. The effect was designed by Bob Moog—yes, that Bob Moog, and in the ‘70s, finding a studio without one proved more difficult than the converse. To this day, original MPF-1s sell for hundreds of dollars, but the PDF-1 improves on the design by adding a switch that goes from Clean to a new Dirty mode. The sound is an “enhancer” but not in the super-subtle way normally associated with that term. Users select a frequency range, called “Bandwidth,” and then an amount of boost. This can lead to some really interesting textures and enhancements for one’s instrument. However, the real bread and butter of the PDF-1 is how it stacks with, well, ANY gain pedal. All pedals used in conjunction with the PDF-1 sing like a bird, from the lowliest plastic boxes through the usual boutique suspects, nothing sounds worse with the PDF-1 in tow.

PETTYJOHN ELECTRONICS PREDRIVE Players and gearheads alike may have been elbows-deep in electronic lore when they stumbled across the term “IC.” Most musicians brush off the term, knowing it as a generic catchall for “those little black boxes with more than three legs” on circuit boards. Some might call them a “chip.” At any rate, IC stands for Integrated Circuit, which amounts to a circuit within a circuit. That’s right, inside that tiny black box lies a host of tiny transistors, resistors and capacitors. To take a page from the audiophile book, a “discrete IC” is all those components from inside the IC, and tweaked for optimum performance and exposed

38 TONE TALK // From the Pedalboard to the Mixing Board

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to the air. These discrete ICs are very expensive and usually for the $500 cable set. However, Albany, Oregon’s Pettyjohn Electronics uses two of those in the PreDrive, its flagship pedal. The unit utilizes a no-expense-spared mentality with the aforementioned ICs, full WIMA capacitor set, a transformer-balanced direct out, buffered tuner output, and a Vari-Z switch to match multiple guitar pickups. Couple all that with stunning good looks and you’ve got a pedal ready to ride shotgun at the mixing desk.

CARL MARTIN OCTA-SWITCH When you’re in the studio, sometimes your ideas can get a little out there. Wouldn’t it be awesome to have a tool at your disposal that can satisfy any strange pedal-related whim that might chance into your head? Picture this: you are playing a riff, and you want phaser, chorus and reverb on one part, then you need all those things turned on, with vibrato, overdrive and delay in their place. Normally, this would require lots of re-tracking and general tomfoolery. However, the Octa-Switch is an ingenious device that remedies tomfoolery in a hurry—on stage or on carpet. The device is set up much like a true-bypass looper; there are eight sets of ins and outs on the rear edge of the pedal, and eight corresponding footswitches on the top. However, there is a bank of DIP switches for each switch. Each footswitch can be “assigned” any number of loops activated using the DIP switches. That said, the aforementioned recording nightmare detailed above can be distilled down to two simultaneous button presses. Just like that.

JHS COLOUR BOX Much ado has been made about Rupert Neve and his boards throughout all genres of music. The Beatles recorded on them. Kool Keith raps about them. The name Neve is synonymous with painstakingly engineered quality. Though the JHS Colour Box is not affiliated with Neve products in name, the circuit housed therein is

meant to emulate a classic Neve preamp—the finest in the business. Those in the know, know that the Neve 1073 is the one. The Colour Box offers that “direct-in” feeling with XLR/quarter-inch ins and outs and a Lundahl power transformer. The pedal runs on 18 volts, so there’s as much headroom as you could ever ask for, and cranking all the dials results in a blown-out visceral fuzz reminiscent of Neil Young or Randy Jackson. Running a guitar into the Colour Box and straight into a DAW can yield some choice results, and the Colour Box can even drive a guitar amp properly, which makes it a versatile tool in any room.

TECH 21 SANSAMP PARA DRIVER DI If there’s one company on this list that knows bedroom-to-studio-to-stage, it’s Tech 21. The original Sansamp pedal was introduced way back in 1989. Tons of players used it then, and Tech 21 still makes the original pedal even now, 26 years later in 2015. Of course, it’s called the Classic now, because there are several members of the Sansamp family, including the Para Driver DI. The “Driver DI” series was even launched in 1992, proving that Tech 21 is an early innovator in the field. The Para Driver DI is useful for running “direct-in” with pretty much any instrument on Earth, and it outputs a parallel out, an XLR out and a quarter-inch out. There’s not a lot that this box can’t do, so your imagination is the best guide. It can be used as a speaker simulator, a mixer channel enhancer, a mixdown processor, as well as an interface to process acoustic guitar, saxophone, harmonica, violin, vocals, piano, and whatever else. The new version contains a “Rumble Filter” that eliminates acoustic low frequency spikes, as well as an Air switch that adds a little sparkle to acoustic guitars. If you’re reading this, you don’t know about the Para Driver DI, and now, why don’t you have one of these yet?

3LEAF AUDIO ENABLER Not much is left to the imagination of the Enabler, the self-proclaimed “Swiss Army knife for bass.” 3Leaf is not kidding—the Enabler is the model with the compass,

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k i l l e rnail file and toothpick. For starters, there are both XLR and quarter-inch inputs and a ground lift switch. There’s a balanced line driver that is whisper-quiet and can drive virtually any load. There’s a studio-grade headphone amplifier with a 100 percent unique power supply inside, a robust EQ section that is capable of actually driving a power amplifier, and there’s an auxiliary input. The auxiliary input processes an iPad, iPhone, or anything else, and allows you to mix it into your bass signal, which is fed into the headphone amplifier. This allows for dead-quiet early-A.M. practice sessions where a low-quality headphone rig simply won’t do. If you want your practice sessions to sound exactly as they would when running into a console at full volume, load a drum track onto your mobile device and let it rip in the bedroom. This can be a boon in the studio also, as you can work on your parts while the rest of your band does its thing elsewhere.

DARKGLASS ELECTRONICS VINTAGE MICROTUBES DELUXE Like some other pedals on this list, the Darkglass Vintage Microtubes Deluxe is an overdrive pedal-turned-studio tool, but rather than excelling in one field and dragging its feet in another, the VMD excels at everything. The warm sound offers dynamic compression like the front end of a studio tape machine, so if the studio you’re recording in is equipped with such a device, the VMD can help you acquire the precise sound your instrument will have when it rolls onto the take-up reel. There’s an active three-band EQ circuit, which is voiced for bass (but it works for everything) and a balanced line driver, good for going right into the board. There’s a Parallel Out for some inventive studio signal chains and the aforementioned Direct Out. A clean blend helps bass players regain any low-end that may be sapped by the processing, as well as an interesting “Era” knob. When used in conjunction with the Drive control, the Era control can coax some interesting (and incredible) textures from the VMD.

“IF YOU’RE READING THIS, YOU

DON’T KNOW ABOUT THE PARA DRIVER

DI, AND NOW, WHY DON’T YOU HAVE

ONE OF THESE YET?”

40 TONE TALK // From the Pedalboard to the Mixing Board

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for the fuzz hungry

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The Mojo Hand FX Extra Special Overdrive, is the company’s second take on the infamous Dumble amplifier, the first being the DMBL. The new Extra Special offers significantly more gain, for that sweet saturated lead tones that has been made famous by Mr. Dumble since the 1960s.

This reviewer does not own an original Dumble amp, and at $20,000–50,000 on the used market, he likely won’t ever own one; or if he does, divorce can’t be far behind! That’s not to say I wouldn’t want one. But I’ve listened to numerous recordings that have been

made with Dumble amps, and likely you have too. If you’re unsure of what a Dumble sounds like, a quick scan of YouTube can give you a basic idea of its tone. It can be characterized by that sweet singing, saturated, liquid tube tone with great sustain.

Suffice it to say, a pedal emulating a highly sought-after vintage amplifier will give you an approximation of that tone. But consider how all other variables will come into play—your amplifier, guitar, and pickups to name a few. The Extra Special has the looks

of the amplifier, with a matte black face and white sides. The black knobs and white lettering are fairly easy to see from afar, and controls are volume, gain, accent and tone. All controls have lettering from zero to 10. There’s also a small switch in the middle for a Jazz or Rock setting.

Let’s look closer at the two settings: Jazz has a little less gain and volume overall. I think it’s meant to help tame brighter single coil pickups, but overall, it felt less alive. I much preferred the Rock setting overall with all types of

42 GEAR REVIEW // Mojo Hand FX Extra Special Overdrive

MOJO HAND FX EXTRA SPECIAL OVERDRIVE REVIEW BY IAN GARRETTSTREET PRICE $199.95

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pickups and guitars. For the most part, this is the setting I used throughout.

The controls are fairly obvious, with the Accent acting sort of like a presence knob. One surprise for me was the Volume control. Usually I find a lot of overdrives seem to have tons of volume at very low settings. And then as I turn up the gain, it can be harder to control the volume to an appropriate setting. Not so with the Extra Special. With the Gain turned off, and the Volume control turned up all the way, I had enough volume for a slight boost, but not much more. But the amount of gain comes quickly with the Extra Special. You get a nice bite around three on the dial, and at 10 you have a very compressed, tube-like saturation gain going on. I preferred the Gain setting somewhere in the middle.

WHAT WE LIKE I liked the Extra Special with my Strat and Telecaster, with both having Custom Shop pickups in them. But this pedal really came alive with my Les Paul, featuring a pair of Burstbuckers. Their extra punch really brought out the best in this pedal, and that liquid, sustaining tone became rapidly apparent. You can hear individual notes even though a fair amount of that spongey, tube like saturation engulfs everything. But I loved how chords were thick and meaty, but never sloppy or congested—a tough trick to pull off sometimes.

CONCERNS As mentioned, the Jazz setting wasn’t for me. I’m also not a fan of overdrives that cut bass—or at least gives the perception of doing so because the mids and in this case the treble too, are quite accentuated. But it’s not like a Tube Screamer either because the gain on the Extra Special is more saturated and thicker. But once I plugged in my Les Paul and just let ‘er rip, all was forgiven and forgotten. In fact, with a decent amp and this pedal, you might otherwise fool someone into thinking you just mortgaged the house to get that Dumble.

Destroy time with the Obscura Altered Delay from DigiTech. Its four delay modes can be darkened, degraded, and distorted on the fly with the stacked Tone and Degrade controls. Combine these controls with Repeat/Hold and lose yourself in long trippy, gurgling repeats or manipulated backwards sonic mayhem. Obscura also has excellent sounding Analog, Tape, Lo-Fi, and tap tempo modes with beat divisions, stereo in/out, tails switch, and true bypass.

© HARMAN 2015

VFE Blues King OAt first glance, the VFE Blues King Overdrive pedal seems to be geared towards blues enthusiasts. And maybe so, but it has a lot to offer other genres as well. The Blues King, while being a mostly low- to medium-gain overdrive, has a fair amount of tweakability to it, yet it isn’t one of those pedals that you spend more time tweaking than playing. Once you match the Blues King to your amp and guitar, there isn’t a whole lot of adjustment needed.

After playing the Blues King for a while, I quickly found out how well it

interacted with my amp. I like to call this type of pedal a “foundation” type overdrive. The reason being: For the most part, it never calls too much attention to itself. Its main purpose is to make your amp seem like more—a little more gain or volume when you need it, a little more treble bite should you want it, a bit more compression at times when the job calls for it. But essentially your amp, with just a bit more of what you like about it.

What the Blues King is not, is an “amp in a box” type pedal. There are enough pedals out there

right now that try hard to emulate some other type of amp, be it a Marshall, a Vox, and others. There’s nothing wrong with that (as I have a few myself), but the refreshing thing about the Blues King is that it assumes you like your amp and don’t want it to sound like something it is not.

The Blues King has a somewhat traditional layout, with three regular sized controls for Volume, Drive and Tone (treble). But then there are three other smaller controls, labeled Bass, Hard and Soft. The Bass is self-explanatory, but is quite welcome in my

46 GEAR REVIEW // VFE Pedals Blues King Overdrive

VFE PEDALS BLUES KING OVERDRIVE REVIEW BY NICK RAMBOSTREET PRICE $189.00

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book. It’s neutral at noon, turned counter-clockwise it adds bass, and turning it clockwise cuts bass. This helps a lot with different types of pickups, and personally I feel most overdrives should have this option.

The Soft control transitions between asymmetrical (counter-clockwise) and symmetrical clipping (clockwise) clipping. This affects the amount of compression heard with the drive set higher. At around noon, the least amount of compression is heard. The Hard control lets you choose between asymmetrical germanium distortion (clockwise) or symmetrical silicon distortion. Again, the least amount of compression will be at noon. These two controls really help you match the Blues King to your amp and the various pickups you might have in different guitars.

WHAT WE LIKE What the Blues King does right: the manner in which it complements your amp;

it will make an amp sound better in a very natural way. It is especially appealing to owners of single channel amps. My problem: I use a 15 -watt Fender tube amp. Getting the tubes cooking requires the amp to be set quite loud. For home or recording use, that isn’t always practical, and even for small gigs, it can be too loud. My solution: I set my amp on the edge of breakup, then leave the Blues King on all the time, with the Volume set for a bit of boost, and I add some extra gain with a little added compression. Then I can ride my guitar’s volume control to find that sweet spot, because it cleans up so easily. I get a great natural sounding blues to rock crunch, yet my amp still sounds like my tone, without the hearing loss—bonus!

Another great setting: keep the gain set lower—around noon where it acts more like a boost pedal—then turn the Volume control up pretty high. It works similarly to how many use a traditional Tube Screamer

pedal: at low gain, and with lots of volume to push the mids higher than anything else, making a more heavily-driven amp scream. The nice thing about the Blues King is that it doesn’t artificially boost mids, and it doesn’t cut the bass, unless you want it to. Again, if you love your amp, the Blues King will just give you more of what you like about it.

CONCERNS None.

The Neunaber describes its Echelon delay pedal as a “mono echo pedal,” which is an almost comically flat description of such a lovely, lively pedal. The Echelon is, indeed, an “echo pedal,” and its output is mono only (there is a stereo version), but the feature set and sound quality are unusual given the price point.

My initial response to the Echelon was excitement at realizing someone had finally implemented a traditional tap tempo functionality into a small, single-footswitch box. That initial thrill was quickly superseded by

my excitement over the Echelon’s sound.

On the company’s website, it says the Echelon offers “the warm analog sound of a tape echo.” I think this is terribly misleading, but only because the Echelon has a gorgeous sound all its own. When I think of a (well-maintained) tape delay, I think of a placid, balanced repeat of the original signal. The echo takes up a lot of room but doesn’t call attention to itself. The Echelon is the opposite: Tonally, it’s not “big;” there’s a lot of top end that’s glossy but not brittle, and an astonishing

amount of depth, but there’s not a lot of body. This means the mix doesn’t get cluttered, but the player gets definition and a very euphonic effect.

If I’d heard this pedal a month ago, I’d own it now. I’ve been slowly crawling back to my roots in shoegaze, and delay is becoming more important to the sound on my band’s new record. I was finding that the lovely, neutral digital delay I’d been using for the last several years wasn’t working as I brought it up in my mix. I figured I need either an analog-through signal, to help

50 GEAR REVIEW // Neunaber Audio Effects Echelon Mono Echo

NEUNABER AUDIOEFFECTS ECHELON MONO ECHO REVIEW BY ERIC TISCHLERSTREET PRICE $179.00

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differentiate my clean signal from the neutral delays, or I needed a delay with a more explicitly analog voice—which is to say one that was darker with more degradation. I also needed tap, and I had a wish list of a few other bells and whistles that were nice-to-haves.

I found a (used) very well-regarded digital delay that offers tweakable analog voicing and tap, as well as the bells and whistles I hoped for (I should add that, new, this pedal costs twice as much as the Echelon). I’ve been very happy this last month but, on principle, I don’t like to deliberately degrade my tone unless I’m using distortion or fuzz, so the slap I gave my forehead when I heard the Echelon was painful. Sonically, the Echelon is definitely additive—like so many clean boost pedals that users claim add fairy dust to their tones--but musically it perfectly complemented my tone. Maybe it’s the analog-through signal that makes all the difference, but I’d suggest it’s the

excellent tuning of the delay effect, and the way it turns each note into a glistening bubble that slowly floats away.

So, yeah, it sounds great. The other must-have for me was tap, and those who’ve already done some digging may be confused about the Echelon’s tap mode (as well as the bypass and buffer modes). Basically, you have to power the pedal on up to four times to cycle through the Tap Priority and Bypass priority settings and their respective true bypass or buffered bypass settings. In Bypass priority, the Echelon’s operation is pretty simple: The footswitch turns the pedal on and the “Time” knob controls the rate of the delay trails (note there’s also a Mix knob to blend the delay and dry signal, and a Repeats knob to determine the number of echoes). In Tap Priority, you tap in the tempo and then activate the effect with a single tap; you turn it off the same way. If you don’t tap the pedal again after one second (the maximum

delay time available) the pedal simply engages or disengages. That may sound complicated (and it seemed complicated as I read the manual), but, once the pedal is set to Tap Priority it’s as easy and intuitive to use as the tap function on any delay pedal.

WHAT WE LIKE Beautiful tone and traditional tap tempo option in a small, affordable package.

CONCERNS The lack of tweakability may throw some people who are used to twiddling with parameters.

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Not unlike Ron Burgundy, the Analog Man King of Tone is kind of a big deal. It’s been in existence in one form or another since 2003 and is currently in its fourth version (since 2006). It’s been in high demand since it was first released. As of now, the waiting list is about ten months. That might seem long, but it’s much more ideal than the 16–24 months to which it had previously stretched.

The history: Mike Piera of Analog Man developed the King of Tone input from Jim Wieder. Jim wanted a pedal that could make his Deluxe Reverb sound like the cranked version of itself,

but at more ear-friendly volumes. And after years of using a Tube Screamer, he wanted something that better preserved the lows and didn’t boost the mids quite so much. Mike and Jim used the circuit of the Marshall Blues Breaker as a starting point, but many tweaks and mods have been made along the way, to the extent that the King of Tone is more than just a modified Blues Breaker.

In essence, the King of Tone is two pedals in a single box, each with controls for Volume, Tone, and Drive. The pedal features a group of four internal DIP switches that allow each side to be set for

either clean boost, overdrive, or distortion. There is also an internal “treble boost” control.

Clean Boost: This mode is pretty darn clean. If you crank the Drive control beyond 2:00, it will start to add a little bit of grit to your tone. But while this setting might not add much grit, it still carries the signature EQ properties of the King of Tone—this means that the boost is far from transparent. Instead, it cuts a little bass—just enough to keep the low end from getting mushy—and adds a healthy kick in the low mids (the kind of push that gives single coils the thickness of humbuckers). Then, you can

54 GEAR REVIEW // Analog Man King of Tone

ANALOG MAN KING OF TONE REVIEW BY PHILLIP DODGESTREET PRICE $235.00 AND UP

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use the Tone control to refine the high end. Oh, and the amount of volume on tap is pretty hefty—more than enough for me.

Overdrive: This is why people wait months (or pay inflated secondhand prices) for a King of Tone. On this setting, you get the perfectly-voiced EQ signature mentioned above but with much more grit available. The character of the grit is very amp-like, and the King of Tone is very responsive to playing dynamics and volume knob cleanup.

Distortion: As the name suggests, switching the DIP switches on either side to Distortion mode creates a much heavier, hard-clipped tone. It’s not quite as natural or dynamic as the overdrive tone (especially as you crank the gain) but it’s still pretty great for a pedal. It’s also a much more compressed tone. And it’s amazingly low noise. Analog Man suggests setting the right side for the higher gain tone and the left side to lower gain. Doing so will allow for volume boost. Doing the opposite allows you to maintain consistent volume

and go from a low or mid-gain overdrive to a thicker, heavier lead tone.

So how does the King of Tone perform in the real world and where does it excel? I tested it with a range of guitars and amps, and quite frankly, it worked well in most situations. The boosted low-mids makes it a great mate with Strats and Teles, especially when pairing them with a Fender amp. Those same boosted low-mids made me love the King of Tone a little less with humbucker and P90 guitars. The internal treble control adds an extra dose of versatility, and I found it perfect for shifting the pedal for use between brighter and darker amps.

The biggest surprise with the King of Tone was how well it paired with the Top Boost channel of my AC15. It’s a finicky channel that, when paired with some overdrive pedals, can get fizzy in hurry. However, careful tweaking of the internal treble control and the external Tone knob makes for one heck of a great screaming Vox tone.

Of course it should come as no surprise that the King of Tone is flat out great through a Princeton Reverb. You are just a click away from a shimmery clean tone and a gutsy dirt tone. Click to engage the left side as well—boom—here comes the lead tone of your dreams.

WHAT WE LIKE A lot of great overdrives have come on the market since the 2003 launch of the King of Tone. Some can certainly give it a run for its money, but there’s a reason that after 12 years, people are still willing to wait just short of a year to get a King of Tone. It just sounds great.

CONCERNS The long waiting list is a bit of a drag. But if you can’t stand the wait, you can pay through the nose for a “second-hand” King of Tone or check the Analog Man website on Wednesdays in hopes of grabbing a Prince of Tone.

TONE REPORT

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