Turns out these things are insanely cheap new as well at around $16 bucks from Musician's Friend.
It doesn't get any simpler than this pedal. It is a small footprint pedal with three basic knobs mounted on the side-"Level" is volume, "Tone" is self explanatory and "Dist" is the amount of dirt desired. The overall build quality is about what you'd expect from a cheap pedal. The case is heavy gauge plastic and the graphics are stickers-which immediately raised some questions in my mind about durability in a live situation.
I plugged my vintage reissue Fender Strat into this bad boy and fired up the old Vox tube amp. Upon stepping on the pedal, I was rewarded with some very recognizable hard rock tones-warm, rich and chewy. Nothing fancy here-just surprisingly organic sounding tonal goodness.
Tweaking the Distortion knob drives home how versatile this pedal is. The higher settings are over the top enough to be unusable for my taste but the low range setting on the dial yielded a nice overdriven tone. As I tweaked the knob steadily higher I was rewarded with steadily heavier and very useful distorted tone with ample sustain that was perfect for Hard Rock and Classic Metal solos. This is not an overly "fuzzy" distortion-which to me is a good thing. If you are into AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and early Metallica this pedal will work nicely for you. This is the tonal equivalent of macaroni and cheese-comforting and more or less exactly what you'd expect.
For sixteen bucks I was blown away. I've played distortion pedals that cost me a C-note that weren't this versatile! I did notice that this pedal has significantly more bass than many distortion pedals I've used regardless of where you set the tone control. Around 12 o' clock seemed to give me the most usable all around tone for my particular setup.
Now the negatives. Obviously durability being stomped on night after night in a live rig is a big question mark. At $16 a piece, you could certainly carry three of these and have a backup for your backup-but changing pedals out mid gig is an unnecessary pain. The pedal is somewhat noisy with noticeable hiss-although this can be mitigated somewhat with the level control-since this pedal has a pretty hot output. It also helps to place it properly in your signal chain so the noise isn't exacerbated by its placement with other pedals. This pedal also isn't true bypass. Of course at $16 new in box I can't complain too loud about any of these things.
This pedal is ideal for the beginner wanting to start using pedal by virtue of the ridiculously cheap price. It is also ideal for the practice room. While it will never replace a high quality distortion pedal, it is a highly versatile pedal that does exactly what you expect out of a distortion pedal. What other piece of gear are you going to buy for $16 that does that?
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