The Fowl Sounds Backstabber 2.0 is a RAT-style distortion pedal designed for bass but that also works well with drop-tuned and baritone guitars. It employs a more modern circuit to deliver tighter and more responsive tones and a series of filters to improve the low-end.
This is basically a two-channel pedal where the two signals are blended together through the Blend knob. Each channel has a drive and a Lo-Pass filter: the Cut knob affects the signal’s frequencies of the Drv channel, while the LPF knob does a similar high-cutting job for the Gain channel.
There’s also a 3-way clipping toggle that delivers red led clipping (up position), Zener clipping (center), and white LED (down position).
Here are the first videos of this pedal, which we added to our article about the Best Rat-Style Distortion Pedals.
The charge pump lets the op-amp run with more headroom and allows for more quiet operation. The original RAT is known for a specific frequency response do to the inability of its IC to amplify quickly. Instead of chasing unicorns, the Backstabber uses filtering to emulate the frequency response. We are using a more modern IC which results in RAT-like tones that are tighter and more responsive.
Original signal is run through a highhead overdrive cirucit, Which can be used as a traditional clean blend, or parallel overdrive.
Works with 2.1mm Boss styled standard 9-volt power jacks (Sorry, no batteries). Consumes less than 50mA. Upgraded power supply with over-engineered capacitors and resistors keeps this thing quiet.
CONTROLS
Gain. Controls gain of the main circuit
DRV – controls gain of the “clean” side.
Blend – Blends gain and dry features. Fully CCW is the DRV side and fully CW is the gain side
Cut Hi cut filter for DRV knob
LPF Hi Cut filter for the Gain knob
Volume – works as expected
Toggle North is red led clipping, center is Zener clipping and south is white LED.
