Pedal geeks i need u (help jjjusten make decisions about awesome pedals for his store)

i realize that could sound like shade and i don't mean it that way. i'm just sad about it.

wait, what happened to catalinbread?

just did some googling and... eurgh, that sucks :(

Nick Harris was killed by a falling tree branch two years ago. There has been fallout from that. Howard Gee, one of their other main designers, appears to have split from the company in the past few months and the reasons are as far as I know shrouded in mystery. They did a weird interview at winter NAMM where the guy running the booth didn't seem to know enough about the pedals to talk about them in-depth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKUONqc8170

yeah i knew about nicholas but hadn’t heard howard had left - he seems like such a cool guy and a really talented designer, hope he goes onto even better things

Howard's instagram is very good if you like cats and guitars

That Formula 55 pedal looks awesome, as does the Wampler Tweed '57 overdrive I learned about when I went down the rabbit hole. I have a Greer Ghetto Stomp, though, which I loved the second I heard Rick Holmstrom use one with Mavis Staples (he just keeps it snap, crackling and popping for the whole set), and I'm not sure if it supplies more or less enough the same stuff as those others.

Man, that sucks about Catalinbread. I had no idea Howard wasn't involved anymore. He seems like a genuinely cool guy, with a ton of weird and original ideas. Hope he can get something bigger and better going in the future.

I still want to get a Bicycle Delay eventually.

Holy shit at the Bicycle Delay. That's got to be the best mostly impractical pedal ever. All these weird reverbs out there. For a while I wanted an Earthquaker Device Afterneath, that was a neat one.

A while ago a friend recommended the TC Electronics Hall of Mirrors, which is a pretty good reverb replicator. He also recommended the far less bespoke Zoom Multistomp, which comes close on a lot of fronts to what it is digitally mimicking.

Personally I don't feel a great need for more overdrives, more amp emulations, or more delays and reverbs. I tend to get two or three good options in my arsenal and use those. In a normal gig I might use four sounds, and I would wager that no one in the audience would notice more than two (if they even think about it, which is itself vanishingly unlikely).

Me, what I want more of is modulation effects that are not primarily dependent on screwing with the fundamental pitch. So, flangers, phasers, ring mods, envelope filters, autowahs.

Copilot fx are great at these imo, I have both the antenna and the orbit and love the pair of them.

jjjusten, what do you know about Hermida Audio?

I picked up their EPH-3 Tape Echo Simulator yesterday and I'm madly in love. Some quick Googling doesn't really tell me much about them. Any thoughts?

Anyone seen this one yet? https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/plasma-pedal-high-voltage-distortion-unit-guitar-rock#/

not gonna lie that looks pretty effin rad

alf hermida came to prominence on the strength of a couple of drive pedals. one man shop, long wait list with the usual market distortions. he's since partnered with Lovepedal for production/promotion/distribution, so now afaik he just designs circuits and love pedal sean does his thing with them. generally good stuff and now super affordable too. i like the zendrive and variants a lot for those rare occasions when i'm feeling smoooooooth.

That's cool. I'm just completely floored by the EPH-3. I never thought I'd see a delay that made me rethink whether or not the Carbon Copy and the Jim Dunlop Echoplex were my #1 and #2 favorites. It's seriously that good.

Holy moly - the Kilobyte so much fun!

So, because I am obviously an absolute whore for delay, I picked up the Walrus Arp-87 and was really underwhelmed with it, unfortunately. It had no knob to adjust the delay time; only the secondary tap tempo footswitch. And because it is a standard size stompbox, it was very hard to get at the tap footswitch with the bypass footswitch being in such close proximity. And the bypass footswitch would sometimes just not work. Very shoddy. And besides, it just wasn't a very good sounding delay.

So I took it back and got the updated Keeley Caverns delay and reverb combo. It is really nice. And very diverse. You can really dive deep and get some different sounds. Only discrepancy is with the Spring reverb mode, as it is kind of hissy. Still sounds great on its own, though. Overall, it's way better than the Arp-87. No comparison, really.

Elvis idk why it never occurred to me but yeah, Kilobyte strikes me as _so you_ lol. And Philippe is one of the good guys for sure.

The bottom having dropped out of the market for my lovely pre-Fender SWR Super Redhead (but idiot optimism telling me that it will be considered a classic soon enough), I am going to hold onto it for the time being. Which means I'm going to need a bass overdrive. What's good? I want something that's fairly touch sensitive (the more I plunk the more it barks) and that gets largely doom metal at extreme settings. I am in Europe, so European obscurities are more readily available to me than American obscurities.

I love my Fuzzrocious Cat Tail, a rat clone, on both bass and guitar. It covers a lot of ground and may be able to work for you. Here is one available in Europe:

http://www.effekt-boutique.de/fuzzrocious-pedals-rat-tail-jetzt-cat-tail.html?___store=en&___from_store=en

Darkglass is a Finnish company that basically specialized in making bass ODs. I had a Vintage Microtubes Deluxe once and it excelled at getting my dinky little practice amp into tube amp territory. You could poke around at their offerings. However, they're pretty expensive - some even say overpriced. I thought maybe they'd be cheaper in Europe since they're from there, but it doesn't look like it.

German and tasty

http://www.stompbox.de/images/description_basstard.jpg

I am covered on the fuzz end (Z. Vex Wooly Mammoth). That Okko looks about right -- thanks! Darkglass mania is in full effect in Europe right now -- in a year or two you'll probably be able to pick 'em up cheap on Reverb, but right now, it's all backordered and full price and no thanks.

hello pedal geeks i know nothing of this world but i'm looking for a chop trem. is hummingbird still my best bet? any more affordable options?

hummingbird is choppy but doesn't have tap tempo if that matters to you. it also has two speed sets and you have to flick a little switch to go from one to the other. i have one i'm not using if you're interested in a trade. you can email me at naamme at gmail if you want.

I will still defend the Boss TR-2 as a really solid tremolo. It can go from slow and smooth to quick and choppy and everything in between. No tap tempo, but enh, price is right: $100 new and usually much less than that second hand.

Has anyone had any experience or knowledge running your guitar through bass effects? In the past, before I upgraded to the Earthquaker Spatial Delivery, I preferred the bass input on the Boss AW-3 Dynamic Wah and I currently prefer the bass input on my Boss BF-3 Flanger. It should be said that I do play very heavy gauge flatwound strings. I currently have these on my guitar — just tossed out the high e string. I'm chasing a bit more of a heavier chorus tone and the MXR Bass Chorus Deluxe is looking pretty enticing. Any thoughts?

I’ve got some trem ideas - if you want full chop, the Idiotbox Mad Doctor/Cyclops/Flash Stutters are optoisolator based and cheap.

I love the Mad Doctor - I have a mental oscillator drone box that has a stereo output so I can have two different fx chains in the output and sticking the Mad Doctor in one means that it accompanies itself.

If you're willing to put up with LED-induced epilepsy, the EHX Super Pulsar can do it all - chop, wobulate, anything.

It's not my personal jones but my longtime guitarist is a big Fulltone fan. Deja Vibe, Supa-Trem, or heck, both.

I am at work without earphones so I can't hear all the demos of the new Earthquaker Pyramids Flanger. From the smug riffing of PGS Andy, to the chummy banter and noisy explorations of Juan Alderete and his scraggly-haired buddy, to JustNick's sober 16-minute judgement of the device. These must wait for me.

How do they sound? It's certainly more expensive than I was hoping for from an EQD flanger, but I guess everything just costs $300 these days.

pgs andy is a saint how dare u

I love his demos, but smug riffage is totally his schtick!

i dunno if smug is the word i'd use, maybe... too slick? he's def my go-to pedal demo guy - really his main problem is that he makes everything sound great

I am of the considered opinion that the EQD Pyramids is hot useless garbage. Those dudes have totally lost their way at this point imo. I love weird, but not weird for weirds sake.

Yeah, I'm sorry to say that their modulation units are all pretty underwhelming.

I like EQD's Grand Orbiter a lot - it's really the only one that's come close to sounding like the Doppelganger.

btw, harman is shuttering DOD and Digitech, so get your Whammys and FreqOuts while you can.

I am not distressed by this. Digitech is no loss.

There will still be tons of DOD on the used market.

I was Freqout was on my list of things I thought I might want so ta for the news.

So, I had three VooDoo Lab Pedal Powers and twentysome odd pedals. And, I was sitting there Sunday afternoon noodling away at my Tele, stepping on different things, just feeling pretty aimless and undirected in general. It occurred to me: maybe the tone I'm chasing isn't in a pedal. I've been exclusively playing a Telecaster for literal years now. I love the sound, but it made me wonder what else is out there.

So, I said fuck it, gathered up a literal bag of pedals and one of the VooDoo Labs (the GC close to me will buy them as used gear, which is cool).

Went down to GC and just started plugging in different stuff.

Some things occurred to me then:

1) I hate all the guitars I tried by Schecter, Ibanez, and Gibson. SGs are the fucking worst. Ugly guitars, play like shit; literally nothing redeeming.

2) Fender has lost its damn mind. Chinese made "modern" Teles with a humbucker in the bridge? Yeah, $500. That is so wrong, it's almost funny.

3) I played a Rickenbacker. Sadly, it seems the legend and prestige, along with the actual awesomeness of the guitar, merits the ungodly high price tag. It was fun to play though, for sure.

In the end, I stuck with Fender. This GC had a few of the single coil/humbucker combo Duo-Sonic reissues left. So, with the trade-in discount I got, it was around $450 (my credit covered most of that). I got the sparkly mint green one. It's a rad guitar. Made in Mexico, got the humbucker in the bridge for maximum dynamic range. Really just a great sound going through my AC15. I did away with all but one of my drive pedals, so I'm now just cranking the Duo-Sonic to full volume and adjusting pedal/amp settings to get the dynamics I want. I'm still at like fifteen pedals, but I'm at least back down to a non-ridiculous setup. And I've already gotten an entirely new perspective on my amp, so yeah: all's well.

Clarification from upthread - DOD/Digitech will continue production going forward, but a key player in their resurrection (Tom Cram, who is a super nice dude) and the rest of the forward looking team are being let go.

bummer... Tom was the keystone in the recent DOD/Digitech renaissance. Guess they figured he’d done enough.

Just ordered a BigSky! Can't wait to hook it up to my synths.

After the news of the changes at Digitech, I decided to go for the markdown open box Obscura delay because it may not be around for much longer and it's pretty awesome. The Tape mode is delicious and definitely worth it. The subdivision options are a bit clunky to access, but that can be worked around with some skillful tap tempo practice. I'm a delay whore, obviously, and the Obscura is absolutely solid.

That Carcosa fuzz they have is pretty cool too.

The Carcosa hasn't left my board since I bought it. I'm selling my Obscura to a friend; it's a lovely pedal but it got replaced in my toolkit by the Meris Polymoon and I don't see it returning.

And as jjjusten said upthread, DOD/DIgitech isn't going anywhere, it's just not going to be doing anything new which is a shame.

I bought a TC Flashbackx4. Found a used one for $150. It's rad AF. The ability to store a preset on each footswitch, which can then be changed with tap tempo makes basically three delays in one.

So, this is just an in general inquiry to anyone who feels like responding. . .

(and I should preface this by saying that, in my experience, most fuzz pedals sound pretty much the same. . . I'm not saying that I'm right about that, I've just not got the nuanced ear that I guess it takes to distinguish between them)

I'm in the market for a fuzz pedal. My general ideas wants about fuzzes and would be something along these lines:

— I just want to step on something and get distortion right away, mostly for leads and single note lines. Right now, I have two Boss drive pedals that I use for these purposes: an SD-1 and a BD-2. I'm very happy with these pedals, but I would like something that just breaks up immediately and is a little more hot.

— I don't like how Big Muffs sound. To me, that is a way too harsh sound. There is no amount of highs that can be rolled off to make that pedal sound like what I'm shooting for.

— I had a Fuzzface once. It was one of the red mini ones. To me, it sounded just like the nano Big Muff I had for a while.

— Ideally, whatever fuzz I end up with would be a very smooth sounding distortion. What I think I mean by that (because, I am not entirely clear, to be honest) is that I would like a nice mid-focused tone. Not necessarily mid BOOSTED, but at least a flatter, non-scooped EQ profile.

Right now, I'm considering one of the Fulltones: 69, 70, or the Soulbender. I did have their Secret Freq, because of the lure of the "Freq" knob. But, that proved to be more of a straight ahead high gain overdrive / distortion pedal. And the "Freq" knob was a little too much for me, as it started to sound like a wah or other type of filter and lost quite a bit of its musicality because of that. I'm definitely open to other options, though.

Fuzzes I've played in the past (and reasons for disliking them) are:
*Nano Big Muff (too scooped, too shrill)
*Dunlop Fuzzface Mini (same)
*Catalinbread Karma Suture (the pink one; it was decent, but would get fizzy sometimes)

I'm playing either my Fender Mexican Telecaster or Mexican Duo-Sonic into the normal channel of my Vox AC15. And I run the Fulltone Full-Drive 2 MOSFET in vintage + MOSFET mode as an always on boost.

Any thoughts?