Purchased From:
St. Johns Music
Price Paid:
30 Canadian, so about 22
Introduction
3 knobs: level, tone and distortion. Foot switch. This is all standard stuff for a distortion pedal. Bought it because of the price and too see how these little cheap pedals actually sounded.
Good Points
This is an excellent sounding pedal. Provides a decent amount of gain and tone control. Obviously it generates a little bit of noise, but no more or less than any other distortion pedal I’ve used. I’ve heard some trepidation from some players about the plastic casing, but I’ve used it live, at band practice, for recording and just messing around with my little combo amp in my apartment, and never once has it failed me. The plastic is of the harder variety, so I’m not too worried about it falling apart any time soon. To my ears, this things sounds best through a loud tube amp, where it sounds surprisingly round and warm, with fairly decent note clarity, even with the distortion maxed out. Backing off on the gain gets a more over driven sound, with some nice break in sound when two or more notes are played together. Great bottom end too, which is something that a lot of distortion pedals seem to have trouble with.
Bad Points
Through a solid state, even a top of the line one (I used some kind of really expensive Randall….. it was my buddy’s) it seems to lose a lot of the warmth and distortion. The note clarity is still there however. The electronics I feel may be easily damaged over time, as their just kind of hanging there when you open up the bottom to change batteries. It wouldn’t be too hard to imagine the battery possibly knocking some the little wires around in there eventually. I have yet to encounter any problems with this pedal though, so hopefully this will never be an issue.
The Verdict
It’s a heck of a pedal for a heck of a price. I find myself using it about 70% of the time in my band, which is way more than I was expecting when I first bought it. As I said earlier, it sounds far superior through a tube amp than anything else, but your mileage might vary. For 20-30 dollars though (you can find them even cheaper on eBay), it’s hard to not at least give this pedal a spin at your next visit to the gee-tar store.
