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

ok arbiter is also killer

and...i apparently cant stop myself, so I am working up an idiotbox order over the next week.

want them all

http://sinkholetexas.com/idiotbox-lo-fi-electronic-instruments-effects

/r/pedalshots

sold out of the rainbow machine and the disaster transport already, sold the chimera from noisemaker the day i got it in, perhaps i am not insane only time will tell

xpost is that cool person code i do not understand

um okay I want the Pac-Man one just because it has Pac-Man on it, I don't even know how to play well enough to even consider introducing pedals into my guitar universe

xp: it was a bad reddit joek

see this is my level of ignorance wrt reddit! which i am happy about. and yeah the pacman graphic is awesome, also dig all the star wars references and the fact that the guy is not wandering down the old bullshit path of pedal buzzwords.

The -D4 is a straight-up distortion pedal. Muthafucka say wha? That ain’t cool and booteek! It should be a non-coloring transparent overdrive or some other bullshit internet forum descriptor. Well, this is exactly what it says.

my kind of guy

look I only learned about subreddit designations in the wake of the outing of the dude who was moderating the ones where ppl were posting pics of random teen girls for others to put in their wank bank, I'm not very deep into this particular rabbit hole

just bought one of everything from idiotbox effects.

i swear that after this i will be done

although these dudes: http://www.stationaudio.net/

goddamnit

new cbread echorec-in-a-box looks to be p sweet if u like hot delay action

hah once again, catalinbread has fallen by the wayside because those motherfuckers just dont ever respond to emails

wtf with those guys? seriously idgi mike is there like 24/7.

smdh

ha did we go through this the last time that i approached catalinbread like 6 years ago?

love their stuff, but between you and me, the graphic redesign they did is srsly nagl.

we did. kills me.

the new graphics are definitely the most polarizing in pedaldom. some folks really seem to love them. some folks won't touch them now no matter how good they sound. tgp panties twisting on the regular. the designer is a phenomenally good guy who does great work in general so I'll go with some i like some less so.

speaking of brilliant redesigns...

http://files.effectsdatabase.com/gear/pics/klon_ktr_001.jpg

holy shit thats great

wait hold on is that a klon centaur?!

worlds most butthurt motherfucker:

http://www.zacharyguitars.com/Klon.htm

ok holy shit, i think i need to devote a thread to this dude, he is amazing

yeah that's apparently the new "klon ktr" -- love the labels on the buffer switch

holy shit we just took in a gold box klon centaur 15 minutes ago from a dude

oh word? how much did you give him for it?

hes a regular customer, so we are doing it on consignment. you might want to sit down before i tell you how much blue book value is.

i'm listening.

According to the 2012 book, $1300. O_O

well shit

that's so awesome. have to wonder what a pedal like that would do for my playing.

I know what it would do for mine! (nothing *sob*)

is it as transprent as they say?

recent ebay sales hovering around $1450 this world we live in i cant even

is it $700 over blue book transparent?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/KLON-CENTAUR-original-early-90s-/121000926617?pt=Guitar_Accessories&hash=item1c2c379d99

will it Nels Cline-ify me?

for $2K, it better make ME transparent (a la the invisible man)...

goddammit i wish i was rich

I've been mostly amp distortion but I got a couple of cool distortion pedals used in the past month.

EWS Little Brute

Zvex Distortron

Very different pedals but both sound really cool.

The Little Brute is pretty much a modern high gain amp channel in a little pedal (that's literally kind of heavy for it's comparitive size). It's got output out the wazoo. Cool thing is that you got two trim pots in the pedal, one for controlling the pedals total output and a second for controlling the total amount of highs in the pedal, which does alter the sound quite a bit. It's real smooth and hi-fidelity sounding.

Zvex Distortron is quite different. It's supposed to be based on a cranked old marshall sound. I don't know about that, but it definitely has a raw raunchy sound that I quite liked, especially since it is a distortion sound way, way different than anything I can usually get with my amp's distortion.

ha i just realized that i proclaimed that i was ordering the idiotbox stuff 2 weeks ago and then forgot to send the order in. doing that monday. dude just dropped the prices on all his stuff, so everything is now $75 or $100, including that mad doctor stutter optoisolator, which is O_Owesome.

heres a custom one for DJP:
http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/306543_428635580531450_1620169917_n.jpg

Time And Relative Dimensions In Stompboxes

it is apparently in tardis blue as well

Wau

Checked out the fuzzbox girl demo of the mad doctor. I like the idea of a tremolo that comes hardwired for an expression pedal, but it seemed like when she moved from one rate to anther like there would be a huge jump instead of a smooth transition. Was I missing something? Still really cool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6wzE8bkvXA

Yo jjjusten, you got any comment on that?^ I was thinking about tremolos and expression pedals again this morning.

i dig it - one thing that it took a while to wrap my head around is the fact that the ratio and rate controls are very interactive (ie changing the ratio will also change the speed). called the dude to make sure it was working right, and he said thats inherent in the design. on any given day the mad doctor or the earthquaker hummingbird could be my fave chop trem in the store. I haven't been motivated enough to get an expression pedal in the mix, but i will try to get to it in the next week or so and see what i think.

related note: death ray frequency mangler is all time awesome, if you like your fuzz batshit crazy. d4 distortion is hugely versatile, lazer fuzz is a one stop bit crushing dream come true, energizer is more subtle than most clean boosts but crazy quiet, blasteroid is prob the most normal of his fuzzes, apply if you want a more whacked out big muff, and the mono cyclops is badass for $75 if you dont need all the tweaky tweaky of the mad doctor. basically everything this dude does is gold, and none of it sounds much like anything else, which is rare in the modern pedal era

i dig it - one thing that it took a while to wrap my head around is the fact that the ratio and rate controls are very interactive (ie changing the ratio will also change the speed). called the dude to make sure it was working right, and he said thats inherent in the design.

Yeah, this is essentially the way that my ehx pulsar works.

spent some more time with the mad doctor, and once you get the hang of it, its a fairly incredible pedal - because it's an optoisolator, it sounds amazing in front of a fuzz, because the off position is full silent instead of having that tiny signal pass you get from a square wave unit. this idiotbox dude is the business, these are def circuits that he has designed from the ground up (well except for the blasteroid, but no one else was going to repro the earth sound research fuzz, so good for him).

in related pedal geek news, i just got an email from the noisemaker effects dude, and he is launching 9 (!) new pedals by the end of the year, including a delay.

ok so in the "so crazy rare i have never even heard of it" category, a dude came in the store today with a Honey Fresh Sounds Fuzz from 1968. The company that preceeded Shin-Ei (who built the Univox Super Fuzz and Univibe, among others) and is so rare outside of Japan it's crazy.

here's a link to the only one that has ever sold on ebay:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=160699832368&item=160699832368&lgeo=1&vectorid=229466

O_O

I will give you $4.95 + shipping

ha out of boredom i contacted the dude that sold the last one and he says he put it up for buy it now at that price and it sold in 15 minutes

nice! rv3 and zoom ultra fuzz! you could probably buy a semi decent car for the value of those two Lovetones.

I took the Lovetones and the Sonic Boom when I had to evacuate for the Eaton Fire. I've had the RV-3 for decades and would immediately replace it with another if I had to.

Nice! I need a new distortion pedal to pair with my big mufff. Is the earth Quaker Hizumitas any good?

Isn't the Hizumitas the Wata pedal?

Yeah I believe so

i have the hizumitas. it's a fun pedal but it's actually got a lot in common with a big muff so it may be redundant unless you're a real fuzz sicko

Thanks CAD. Anyone have a particular distortion pedal they like to pair with the big muff? I used to have one of those boss octave pedals that had a distortion setting that sounded cool with it but it broke

I might be weird about liking common/classic pedals more than unique ones, but I think a plain old Rat or Turbo Rat sounds great into a Big Muff, if you don't crank the Rat too much. The Muff is a little scooped in the midrange and the Rat is the opposite, so you end up getting more presence and solidity from the fuzz. If that's what you're looking for.

Could do the same with any number of mid-heavy overdrives, distortions, or imitation Klons, though. Or any random thing and an EQ pedal. I am possibly just an oaf but I feel like half the things people agonize over with drives can be handled with a cheap EQ? People are out there talking about how they do or don't like $400 pedals for all these subtle frequency-balance reasons, and it's like ... I personally would stop and check if spending $30 on a used Boss equalizer took care of this.

I remember reading in the late 90s how one/both guitarist(s) in Hum used bass distortion pedals to “beef up their sound” but I never tried it out myself.

Xp yeah I found a Reddit thread covering the same question and a lot of folks were mentioning EQ. A cheap answer is a good one

This is a review of a distortion pedal with an EQ built in, but the same applies if you use a separate distortion pedal and EQ pedal (review starts at 5:30)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsSlfr4oBjI
I feel that nearly all situations where a distortion or fuzz doesn't have quite enough INSERT_FREQUENCY_RANGE_HERE can be fixed with an EQ in the chain.

not a pedal, but I've been using a Warm audio 1073 preamp/eq and man oh man, the EQ on that thing for guitar and bass. super musical and beautiful.

Alternatively, if you don't want to go with a dedicated EQ pedal some overdrives could fit in here too. Walrus' Voyagers are OK for boost, but terrific if you think of it as an always-on tone-shaper.