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Dusky Electronics Toasted Drive Review

Dusky Electronics Toasted Drive Review

An incredibly versatile overdrive that will bring the most out of your rig.

Wonderfully organic overdrive tones. Inventive control setup.

Not for the hi-gain set.

$175

Dusky Electronics Toasted Drive
duskyamp.com

4.5
4.5
4
4.5

I love playing a piece of gear that makes me forget that I’m playing a piece of gear. While there are plenty of weird and wacky stomps that will make your guitar sound like sci-fi soundtrack, the Dusky Toasted Drive is certainly not one of those. It’s part clean boost, part medium-gain overdrive, and 100-percent useful. And though the controls look like those from a very standard overdrive, Dusky’s efforts to mine new gold out of a classic setup yield tone treasure.


The temperature (gain), more (volume), and color (treble boost) controls are very interactive with each other, which means many possible variations on the basic voice. The Toasted Drive also uses MOSFET gain stages rather than diode clipping to generate dirt. To my ears (and fingers), this gives the pedal a much more amp-like sound and feel and allows natural guitar/amp tones to shine more clearly.

Even at maximum settings for each parameter, the Toasted Drive never gets unwieldly, out of control, or harsh. Its tone is focused with rather tight midrange response and plenty of high-end that you can sculpt with either your guitar’s controls or the pedal’s color knob. And its natural transparency means I would happily use it as the first source of drive in a pedalboard gain stack. At $175 the Dusky competes with many similar and very nice pedals, but you’d be hard pressed to find one that slides into your signal chain so effortlessly.

Test Gear: Fender Stratocaster, Schroeder Chopper TL, Fender Jaguar, Revv D20

Delicious, dynamic fuzz tones that touch on classic themes without aping them. Excellent quality. Super-cool and useful octave effect.

Can’t mix and match gain modes.

$349

Great Eastern FX Co. Focus Fuzz Deluxe

greateasternfx.com

5
4.5
4.5
4.5

Adding octave, drive, and boost functions to an extraordinary fuzz yields a sum greater than its already extraordinary parts.

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Patterns can be viewed as boring or trite, but a little bit of creativity can turn them into bits of inspiration.

Chops: Intermediate
Theory: Intermediater
Lesson Overview:
• Learn different ways to arrange scales.
• Combine various sequences to create more intersting lines.
• Solidify your technique by practicing unusual groupings of notes. Click here to download a printable PDF of this lesson's notation.
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Neutrik’s Timbre plug, made for toggling between capacitors.

Photo courtesy Neutrik company (https://www.neutrik.com)

This follow-up to May 2025’s column shows you a few basic techniques to inject some capacitance into your rig.

Hello, and welcome back to Mod Garage. This month, we will dive into the details of how to add additional guitar-cable capacitance—the right way. Time to get started!

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MayFly Le Habanero Review

Great versatility in combined EQ controls. Tasty low-gain boost voice. Muscular Fuzz Face-like fuzz voice.

Can be noisy without a lot of treble attenuation. Boost and fuzz order can only be reversed with the internal DIP switch.

$171

May Fly Le Habanero

mayflyaudio.com

4
4
4
4

A fuzz/boost combo that’s as hot as the name suggests, but which offers plenty of smoky, subdued gain shades, too.

Generally speaking, I avoid combo effects. If I fall out of love with one thing, I don’t want to have to ditch another that’s working fine. But recent fixations with spatial economy find me rethinking that relationship. MayFly’s Le Habanero (yes, the Franco/Spanish article/noun mash-up is deliberate) consolidates boost and fuzz in a single pedal. That’s far from an original concept. But the characteristics of both effects make it a particularly effective one here, and the relative flexibility and utility of each gives this combination a lot more potential staying power for the fickle.

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