T-Rex Tap Tone
October 2012
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With fantastic delays like the Reptile and Replica already in the company’s
product line (and with famous players like Carlos Santana,
John Mayer, and Pete Townshend endorsing other T-Rex offerings),
you might be justified in wondering why T-Rex would bother with
adding another delay to the mix. The answer, of course, is the taptempo
function that’s the backbone of this pedal. But that’s just part
of the story behind this well-built, super-functional box. There’s a
bite control that can shift the voice from crystal clear to dirty, warbling,
and tape-like, in addition to an essentially warm analog glow
that you can hear in just about every setting. Still, it’s the flexibility
of its namesake function that’s the real bonus. It enables you to seamlessly
and radically shift speeds on the fly, and that gives this T-Rex
so much musical potential to walk away with a Premier Gear award.
t-rex-effects.com
Blackout Effectors Crystal Dagger
October 2012
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We love pedal builders that dabble in the unexpected, the unusual, and
the perverse. That impulse—the drive to mess with sound—is what’s
made a lot of the greatest pedal builders legendary. And it clearly compelled
Blackout Effectors to build the Crystal Dagger—an unlikely
combination of octave fuzz and ring-modulation that can be both nastily
focused and chaotic. Reviewer Jordan Wagner discovered that the octave
fuzz is uncommonly “clean and tight, with smooth lows and mids and a
not-too-piercing high end,” with output that “is detailed across the entire
tone spectrum [and] makes Hendrix-style leads above the 12th fret sound
especially fat.” The ring-modulation function, meanwhile, added everything
from ricocheting phase tones and metallic undercurrents to “fantastic
beating pulses” at the point where octave and modulation effects begin
to blur. In short, the Crystal Dagger is a ticket on a fast train to some very
awesome sonic radicalism that gives you the power to unleash a positively
deadly octave fuzz tone when you need your solos and riffs to be focused
and to-the-point. This is one sharp dagger indeed. blackouteffectors.com
HAO Bass Liner
October 2012
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Reviewer Dave Abdo called the EQ on the HAO Bass Liner preamp
“secret spice,” and indeed, this is the kind of box that can help transform
your bass tones from the stuff of a greasy spoon’s line chef to
complex flavors concocted by a schooled saucier. HAO enlisted the
help of bass-amplification guru Phil Jones to hone the Bass Liner, and
the fruit of the collaboration is a tool of exceptional quality and formidable
tone-shaping power that reviewer Abdo found intuitive and
easy-to-use. Chalk it up to that secret spice—an excellent and effective
6-band EQ that enabled him to dial in everything from midrange
presence to top-end bite and fat, thumping, dubby low end. Abdo
also appreciated the HAO’s capacity to add active pickup-like sensitivity
and liveliness to narrow-voiced instruments. For those of us who
value the feel and vibe of our most treasured 4-string but need a little
extra versatility, the Bass Liner is a potent ally. godlyke.com
Tortuga Manhattan
October 2012
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You’d be forgiven for being a little frustrated if you were trying to
navigate the Tortuga Manhattan for the first time without a manual.
Tortuga mastermind Matt Johnson has a playful design sense that
leads to controls named “bourbon” instead of “feedback,” for instance.
But the fact is that the Manhattan sounds so good in so many ways,
it almost doesn’t matter what knobs you twist—or how. And the
intuitive approach to tone shaping that this pedal inspires is nothing
short of, well … inspiring! That doesn’t mean the Tortuga Manhattan
isn’t a completely practical tone-shaping tool. On the contrary—reviewer James Rotondi found it capable of everything from lush and
convincing Leslie tones to deep, swooshing flanging and atmospheric
chorus tones that proved beautifully musical. Rotondi was moved to
remark that the Manhattan was capable of generating “lovely swaths
of sound” and remarked on its “smoothness, complexity, and depth.”
Sounds worth toasting to us. tortugaeffects.com
Source Audio Soundblox 2 Multiwave Bass Distortion
October 2012
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Source Audio has always been great at taking the extended and
nontraditional potential of the bass guitar very seriously. With the
Soundblox 2, they seem hell-bent on a mission to give bass thumpers
a piece of the distortion action that guitarists get to enjoy in so
many thousands of flavors. And as the 22 distortion settings on this
pedal suggest, they’ve delivered in a big way. The big surprises are the
multiband settings, which split your signal apart and distort them
individually before reassembling your signal into a multi-dimensional
whole. You can tap into filter-like tones and synth-y textures and
further sculpt your distortion voices using the 3-stage noise gate,
the effective tone shape knob, and the simple 4-knob control set
for managing signal mix, tone, and drive levels. With the additional
benefit of programmable presets, it’s a pedal that can crack your basstone
vocabulary wide open. sourceaudio.net
TV Jones Spectra Sonic C Melody
November 2012
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All puns aside, a baritone can extend your guitar technique in more
ways than one. But when a guitar can expand your playing vocabulary
with this much style, you can bet we’re gonna take notice. Twang
(and style) maven Brian Setzer helped inspire TV Jones to make
the Spectra Sonic C Melody (the first of which was a prototype for
Setzer) a production reality. And the version we received was a flatout
blast. Editor in chief Shawn Hammond exclaimed that the “tones
won’t let you down whether you’re plucking spy-movie themes,
Travis-picking rockabilly lamentations, power-chording indie-rock
craziness, or fingering big, complex inversions that use open notes
to crisscross the fretboard and the frequency spectrum.” All of which
says a lot about how deep he went with this guitar, but also how
much fun it is to take the trip. The Spectra Sonic C Melody is one of
those instruments that reminds us playing guitar is an adventure, and
this is one great-looking hot rod for the ride. tvjones.com
Fender Select Precision Bass
November 2012
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The Precision bass, like so many Fenders from the ’50s, is the very
essence of functional elegance. So the notion of a fancy take on the
form can fire skepticism among loyalists, but it would take a pretty
grumpy purist to not acknowledge the arresting beauty of the Select
Precision. Luxurious without resorting to flashy, the Select Precision
features a maple top tastefully finished to highlight the cool flame
without ruining the fluid perfection of the Precision’s lines. But the
luxury runs more than skin deep on the Select P: Reviewer Steve
Cook noted that it was equally at home with metal or country
moods—little surprise there—but noted that the “church quiet”
pickups packed a little more midrange punch that enhanced the basically
vintage flavor. What’s best though, is that this Precision felt and
sounded like a bass you’ll want to play every day. fender.com
Jetter Red Square
November 2012
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Jetter isn’t even close to the first amp or pedal maker to go after
the Holy Grail idea of an all-in-one stompbox that serves up classic
British- and American-amp overdrive. In the case of the Red
Square, Jetter makes few actual claims of Brit-American tone bliss,
but whether Jetter is being coy or just modest, the Red Square goes
a long way toward packing both flavors in a single box. The pedal’s
Helium circuit is a sweet ticket to blackface-Fender-style overdrive—thickening tone and adding a dose of extra pick sensitivity. The Red
Shift side is all Jimmy Page sizzle and searing near-clean tones with a
burlier overdrive voice. We found the Red Square as adept at rhythm
and lead settings, and the overall harmonic richness was a joy in just
about every context. Plus, it’s cheaper than a transatlantic flight and
a whole heck of a lot more fun. jettergear.com
Snark SN-10S Tuner
November 2012
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Anyone who has used a Snark headstock tuner knows the thrill of
experiencing the speed, accuracy, and value packed into one of those
colorful little clip-ons. So when we got our hands on the company’s
new pedal tuner and saw the $50 price tag, we were prepared to be
thrilled. And the SN-10S did little to let us down. For many, the one
complaint against the original Snark was that it felt a little less than
rock-solid in construction, but Snark addressed the issue by concealing
the SN-10S in a die-cast steel enclosure that’s tough as a brick.
But the best part is that the SN-10S actually felt more sensitive than
its already-impressive clip-on cousin. Is it wrong to be this excited
over a tuner? At just 50 bucks, we’ll settle for cheap thrills.
snarktuners.com
Orange Micro Terror
November 2012
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Most traditional Orange amp owners would probably be less than
appreciative if you called their rig adorable, but we couldn’t think
of a better adjective to describe the new Micro Terror. And after we
plugged it in, we weren’t thinking all that much about how it looked
anyway. The Micro Terror delivered Goliath tones from a David-ona-
crash-diet-sized head. And at 20 watts, the amp proved capable of
much, much more than cool practice-amp tones. It’s rich sounding
when running at saturation, and brimming with characterful midrange
content when you dial it in right. And while you won’t get
cathedral-scale headroom out of this little brick, even the clean tones
had us doing double takes. At the price of a stompbox, the Micro
Terror is inarguably a deal—and one that pays both unlikely and surprising
dividends. orangeamps.com
Brunetti Singleman
November 2012
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The little blackface Fenders of old—the Champ, Princeton, and
Deluxe—were such beautiful blank slates for guitar players. Part of
that agreeable, adaptable, sweet-toned nature was the elegant simplicity
of the circuits. And amp-builders were understandably thrilled
to find that building a reasonable facsimile of one of these classics
was an attainable goal. But that same simplicity has often led us to
wonder where else can such a fundamentally sound template take
you? The Brunetti Singleman answers that question with style—using a 16-watt, 6V6-powered foundation as a platform for a circuit
that includes truly useful tweed, fat, and smooth voicing switches, a
mids boost, power-attenuation functions, and a beautifully versatile
EQ that enable you to move beyond obvious tweed and blackface
tone zones and into territory you can carve out as your own. It’s one
handsome-looking amp too, which will make you one stylish guitar
slinger on the sonic and fashion fronts. brunetti.it