Though the company calls Greece home, Jam Pedals has made quite a name for itself well beyond Mediterranean shores. The beautiful, and fantastic sounding work from Jam Pedals has grabbed the attention of players including John Abercrombie and Nels Cline. Some of the most interesting products from Jam’s line are the company’s multi pedals, which are pretty much what they sound like—a player-specified set of Jam pedals in a single box. We reviewed a custom Multi-Pedal, though several more standard versions exist.
Packed For Action
The Multi-Pedal features a compressor, overdrive, and analog delay. It has six jacks laid out on three different sides, and eight knobs and five footswitches on the front panel—none of which are labeled.
Instead, Jam Pedals went for an artful, vintage-gift-wrap finish that incorporates yellowed sheet music and a reproduction of a woman who may have been a ‘50s B-movie queen. It looks cool, to be sure, but makes some obvious sacrifices in terms of functionality. Clearly, Jam has enough faith in the intelligence of their customer to believe that labels, call outs, and standard UI elements are not a requirement to get maximum function out of a device. For the most part, that is probably true. In the case of the compressor, once I learned which knob is for sustain and which is for level it was easy to remember. Since these are custom units, guitar players who tend to party when they play might opt to ask Jam to label their controls.
The Multi-Pedal features (from right to left): a Dyna-ssor compressor inspired in part by the MXR DynaComp and Ross Compressor, a Tube Screamer 808-flavored TubeDreamer+, and the Delay Llama, a BBD style analog delay. The Dyna-ssor and Delay Llama each have a single footswitch, while the TubeDreamer+ has an on/off footswitch and a High Gain switch which adds a healthy dose of high mids and fatness to the overdrive—something original Tube Screamers lacked. The pedal can only be driven by a 9V DC power supply, which is not included.
On the left side of the unit are two output jacks, an A and a B. Top rear has an expression pedal out (for controlling delay time) and Send/Return jacks for an FX Loop. There is also a footswitch about an inch from the Delay Llama's Time knob. This footswitch toggles output between the A and B jacks, making the second out suitable for a tuner or mute. The placement of this switch was an issue for me—when I hit it with my big stupid foot, I often bumped the delay time knob.
Jam Pedals takes great pride in the quality of their devices that extends beyond outward appearances. They use high grade, sometimes hard-to-find components. And as you can imagine, they are not cheap. The unit we tested retails for just over $500 dollars.