One of the most visceral, thrilling sound baths I ever experienced came courtesy of a Turbo RAT. This roar was an amalgam of trashy punk spittle, string detail, Black Sabbath mass, and an imploding Fender tweed. I might have been even happier if the Supercool Barstow Bat was onstage that night instead.
The Bat, resplendent in Ralph Steadman-style acid-nightmare graphics, is unmistakably a RAT at its core. But with the inclusion of a “Turbo” button and a low/mid/high EQ stack in place of a RAT’s filter control, the Bat enables you to explore very specific tone spectra the original could only hint at. And when you factor in the Bat’s ability to work with virtually any guitar tone-and-volume combo, you’re sorta looking at a pedal that’s as different as a real rat is from real bat.
Okay, maybe the difference isn’t that extreme. As I said, RAT genetics are easy to hear here. But the very effective tone controls mean you can transform the RAT vocabulary—which spans low-gain overdrive and lacerating distortion—into 1960s buzz-fuzz realms, exploding lo-fi student-amp zones, and other extremes ranging from fat and blurry to laser-beam trebly. You’ll have to know this pedal well to cover all this ground on a stage—a path well worth pursuing. (It’s just five knobs for cryin’ out loud). And because it finds copious goodness as easily in a 6L6 Fender as an EL84 Vox, it’s the kind of pedal that you should try with any amp, in any musical situation—but especially in the studio, where its unique, rangeful RAT-related voice could be the best kind of chameleon.
