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I played bass in a band in high school, but because I was 16, I wasn't familiar with the concept of discretion and constantly played through a cheap fuzz pedal with all the knobs turned all the way up. My band mates would complain that I was too loud and all the songs lost their fullness without the low end... but I wanted so badly to be heard in the forefront! If I had been playing through the El Rey Lucha Fuzz, all my problems w
ould have been avoided.... Click on the title for more
Wattson FX is a California based team of developers that specializes in reproduction: they take schematics of classic pedals and revamp them with modern electronics in order to give players the chance to play through legendary stomp-boxes for a fraction of the price.
Brimming with confidence, the Wattson Escape Velocity Overdrive, based off of the Ibanez TS-808 Tube Screamer, is the self-proclaimed “…Tube Screamer that Ibanez wishes it had built” - featuring (according to the manufacturer) better bass response, more headroom, and an extra row of controls (the "O2" knob and "Trajectory" switch) that respectively changes the level at which the overdrive circuit begins to clip, and allow you to disable the parts of the circuit that cause the infamous Tube Screamer "mid hump."
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Austin, TX - In March 2014 The Deli's Stompbox Exhibit - a free, interactive, in-the-headphones display of guitar effect pedals - will travel to Austin for its first official involvement in the SXSW's Music Gear Expo, part of the big music festival hosted by the Texan city that week. ... Click on the title for more
One of the most fun tricks we learned in our youth from great indie bands like The Pixies and R.E.M is to use the guitar's pickup switches to turn the long notes on-and-off, which generates some sort of manually controlled square tremolo effect.
But what about having a stompbox that does exactly that and adds some extra features to it? Enter Memento, a prototype Dwarfcraft Devices presented at Winter NAMM 2014. This is a simple pedal for the creative guitarists, that features a "Kill" footswitch on the right - which doesn't lock and turns the sound off when pushed - and a "Recall" one on the left - which basically has the function to loop whatever on/off pattern you created with the Kill button.... Click on the title for more
One of the coolest new product we saw at NAMM was right in our own booth down in Hall E - yes, we were in Anaheim with our Stompbox Exhibit featuring 11 boutique manufacturers.
Stomp Labs, a Canadian manufacturer, debuted its first pedal, the MaX O.D., part of an upcoming series called "XPressWay," which is said to produce "the world's first fully expression enabled guitar pedals."
The MaX O.D. sounds good, but what's really mind blowing about it is what it lets you do to control it - something that opens a lot of creative options for the guitarists with experimental inclinations.
If you connect an expression pedal to this baby, you'll be able to do a couple of things you can't do with any other pedal: tapping once on any of the three knobs (Volume, Gain and Tone) activates the control through the expression pedal, while tapping twice on any of them activates a "reverse" control - i.e. the knob will act as if it's 100% up when the pedal is at 0% and vice versa. A green light on top of the knob indicates normal control, a blue one reversed control.
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