Author Archive
The new 
Pedal and amp manufacturer Mad Professor recently created a new guitar pedal to be sold exclusively through Guitar Center and its subsidiary, Musician’s Friend.
Available later this month for $199, the Golden Cello is an Overdrive/Fuzz with a Delay circuit, designed to give you that classic late 70’s/early 80’s lead sound - using only one stompbox. Play it through any decent, clean amp and you’re promised a “sweet cello-like singing fat lead tone with the most luscious open ambient tape delay.”... Click on the title for more
Pedal and amp manufacturer 
The “vintage telephone effect” on vocals has been in vogue, in particular in lo-fi and electronic music, since Beck’s debut album came out in 1994. Although the market is saturated with “lo-fi” plug ins, all you need to recreate this trick is some EQ, compression and distortion. Compress the vocal track heavily – you can even try with a limiter if you wish – then use a high pass filter on the bass frequencies sweeping from the bottom end to the mids, until you get the sound you are looking for. Then cut also a little bit of the high frequencies with a low pass filter, and make the voice even more nasal with an mid eq boost in the 2-4kHz range. Add a little bit of distortion and… voila’.... Click on the title for more
Way Huge’s Red Llama MkII is a simple pedal that does one thing awesomely well: highly musical overdrive/distortion. While the name implies a redesign, it’s more of a second coming. The Red Llama (street $120) is a reissue of what became a highly sought-after pedal after it disappeared in 1999, now resurrected by Dunlop.... Click on the title for more
The Persuader from MOD Kits DIY (available at modkitsdiy.com for about $65) is a U-build-it, starved plate, 12ax7 distortion box kit. It arrives as a collection of parts to be assembled into a powder-coated purple, pre-drilled Hammond-style cast-aluminum box. A 16 page assembly manual identifies all the included components, and has a solid, but brief tutorial on soldering. At the end of the manual are various tear-out drawings to use as guides in the build process. The step-by-step build instructions were clear, and if you've built a few kits of reasonable complexity, it's fairly straight-forward to build The Persuader. There were one or two steps in the build I thought were not in ideal order; I'll address those later in this review.... Click on the title for more
It's rare to see a band mature as fast as 
