Ask any gearhead guitarist what kind of pedal that they've gone through the most, and a majority of them will say overdrive pedals. Overdrive tone is almost as personal to us as our favorite guitar. There's no feeling quite like playing through an overdriven tone that has the perfect blend of range, tone, response and feel—it can make us feel more in-tune with our instrument, ultimately making us better players.
But tastes change, and all too often we dump an otherwise great-sounding piece of gear for another one, continuing the cycle of searching for that one overdrive that never fails. Andrew "The Tone God" addressed this issue for fuzz-heads with his NerFuzz programmable fuzz. Now he's tackling overdrive with the new ModestScream, which has enough tweakabilitiy to satisfy the most fickle guitarist.
A Modest Proposal
The analog-based ModestScream is capable of dishing out the type of classic tones that make the TS-9 and TS-808 a legend, but also includes four popular circuit board modifications that enable different types of diode clipping (18 in all), blending with the dry tone, changing opamps (choose between an RC4558D, TL072, TLC2272 or a NE5532), and even altering the ranges of the frequency responses themselves.
In a seemingly endless sea of light to medium overdrive pedals, the ModestScream's interface sets it apart from the pack almost immediately. You’ll notice that there aren't any knobs to twist or conventional switches to stomp. Tones are dialed up from the pedal's innovative touch interface, which has three contact points that respond to skin contact only, and it serves as a way to extend the life of the pedal, as there are no parts that can easily snap off. It's also impossible to accidentally change a parameter from a careless swipe of the foot, and the parts will never need replacement from accumulating dirt and grime. The only part that moves is the large metal control plate that engages an internal relay for bypass switching.
There are seven parameters that you can change from the from panel. These include diode type and combination (silicon, Schottky, LED, MOSFET, MOSFET body, and no diode at all), cutoff frequency, opamp chip, clean blend, amount of overdrive, treble level, and overall output volume. Tapping the center contact lets you cycle through each parameter, and a large LED screen tells you the amount or selection that's being used. While it's easy to change any of the settings, it's kind of a pain to do it quickly on the fly—you have to cycle through all of the parameters before you get to the one that you want to alter.
Screaming for Vengeance
The ModestScream is a vintage overdrive lover's dream. With a PRS SE30 amp and a G&L Tribute S-500, I plugged in the ModestScream, selected the first diode and opamp (the RC4558D), and found the tone smooth and luscious. The first diode setting was for two silicon diodes, resulting in symmetrical overdrive—this is what a lot of popular overdrive pedals use in their stock configurations to produce their gain tones. Moving through each of the diode settings really made it apparent just how vast the tonal possibilities were with the pedal, with some of the combinations having more bite on the top end, less or more mids, a raspier response, and so forth. I was particularly taken with the silicon/MOSFET combo, which has a great, tubey tone—perfect for classic rock rhythm work at mid-gain settings.
Ratings
Pros:
Tons of tonal options. Thoughtful interface.
Cons:
Expanded tweakability might be too much for most players to handle.
Value:
Tones:
Materials/Construction:
User Friendliness:
Street:
$230
The Tone God
thetonegod.com
And this was just the tip of the iceberg. Changing the Freq setting was great for dialing in a smooth midrange hump such as setting 3 for the FAT mod circuit. Using a different chip seemed to have the most effect on the tone overall, especially when I switched from the classic RC4558D chip to the TL072—the tone not only got louder, but stronger and clearer, though it shed some of the sweet sag that made the tone so great in the first place.
Essentially, this is the ModestScream's strongest asset, which is complete freedom to tune the overdrive to the tastes of the player. The company claims that there are 576 different combinations at your fingertips, which means there are some great tones and some more iffy ones (certain diode combos sounded a bit harsh).
The Verdict
The beauty of this pedal is that The Tone God knew that tastes in overdrive are wildly varied. And the ModestScream goes beyond the call of duty to offer up as much versatility as possible. It's well-built and easy to use, though it can take a little longer to change settings on the fly. For the picky player who's tired of playing the overdrive buy-and-sell game, this pedal was designed for you—all you really need is a good set of ears to mold it into what you want it to sound like.
Electro-Harmonix Lpb-3 Linear Power Booster & Eq Effect Pedal Silver And Blue
The effect that launched Electro-Harmonix gets a makeover with the Electro-Harmonix LPB-3 Linear Power Booster & EQ. With an active EQ featuring a Parametric Mids control and up to a walloping 33dB of boost, the LPB-3 is the perfect tool for any tone tailoring task. Boost your sound into saturated bliss with transformative precision like never before.
The LPB-3 is capable of boosting up to +33dB of gain with the powerful tone shaping of a 3-band EQ with parametric Mids. The active 3-Band EQ features TREBLE and BASS knobs plus a powerful parametric Mids control with adjustable MID FREQ and Q. BOOST sets the overall output of the pedal with the MAX switch toggling between 20dB and 33dB of maximum boost. Use the PRE-GAIN knob to fine-tune the total gain and boost.
Additional features include selectable Buffered/True Bypass switching and internally extended 30V power rails for enhanced headroom.
Filthy, saturated fuzz is a glorious thing, whether it’s the writ-large solos of Big Brother and the Holding Company’s live “Ball and Chain,” the soaring feedback and pure crush of Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady,” or the sandblasted rhythm textures of Queens of the Stone Age’s “Paper Machete.” It’s also a Wayback Machine. Step on a fuzz pedal and your tone is transported to the ’60s or early ’70s, which, when it comes to classic guitar sounds, is not a bad place to be.
Catalinbread’s StarCrash is from their new ’70s collection, so the company is laying its Six Million Dollar Man trading cards on the table—upping the ante on traditional fuzz with more controls and, according to the company’s website, a little more volume than the average fuzz pedal, while still staying in the traditional Fuzz Face lane.
The Howler’s Viscera
Arbiter Electronics made the first Fuzz Face in 1966. The StarCrash is inspired by that 2-transistor pedal, but benefits from evolution, as did almost all fuzz pedals in the ’70s, when the standard shifted from germanium to silicon circuitry to improve the consistency of the effect’s performance. The downside is that germanium is gnarlier to some ears, and silicon transistors don’t respond as well to adjustments made via a guitar’s volume control.
While Fuzz Faces have only two knobs, volume and fuzz, the silicon StarCrash has three: volume, bias, and low-cut. Catalinbread’s website explains: “We got rid of that goofy fuzz knob. We know that 95 percent of all players run it dimed, and the remaining 5 percent use their guitar’s volume knob to rein it in.”
I suspect there are plenty of players who, like me, do adjust the fuzz control on their pedals, but the most important thing is that the core fuzz sound here is excellent—bristly and snarling, with a far girthier tone than my reissue Fuzz Face. It’s also, with the bias and low-cut controls, far more flexible. The low-cut control allows you to range from a traditional, comparatively thinner Fuzz Face sound (past noon and further) to the StarCrash’s authentic, beefier voice (noon and lower). Essentially, it cuts bass frequencies from 40 Hz to 500 Hz, resulting in an aural menu that runs from lush and lowdown to buzzy and slicing. And the bias control is a direct route to the spitty, fragmented, so-called Velcro-sound that’s become a staple of the stoner-rock/Jack White school of tone. The company calls this dial a “dying battery simulator,” and it starves the second transistor to achieve that effect.
Sweet Song of the Tribbles
Playing with the StarCrash is a lot of fun. I ran it through a pair of Carr amps in stereo, adding some delay and reverb to mood, and used a variety of single-coil- and humbucker-outfitted guitars. While both pickup types interacted well with the pedal, the humbuckers were most pleasing to my ears with the bias cranked to about 2 o’clock or higher, since the ’buckers higher output allowed me to let notes sustain longer before sputtering out. Keeping the low-cut filter at 9 o’clock or lower also helped sustain and depth in the Velcro-fuzz zone, while letting more of the instruments’ natural voices come through, of course.
With the low-cut filter turned up full and the bias at 10 o’clock, I got the StarCrash to be the perfect doppelganger of my Hendrix reissue Fuzz Face. But that’s such a small part of the pedal’s overall tone profile. It was more fun to roll off just a bit of bass and set the bias knob to about 2 or 3 o’clock. Around these settings, the sound is huge and grinding, and yet barre chords hold their character while playing rhythm, and single-note runs, especially on the low strings, are a filthy delight, with just the right schmear of buttery sustain plus a hint of decay lurking behind every note. It’s such a ripe tone—the sonic equivalent of a delicious, stinky cheese—that I could hang with it all day.
Regarding Catalinbread’s claims about the volume control? Yes, it gets very loud without losing the essence of the notes or chords you’re playing, or the character of the fuzz, which is a distinct advantage when you’re in a band and need to stand out. And it’s a tad louder than my Fuzz Face but doesn’t really bark up to the level of most Tone Bender or Buzzaround clones I’ve heard. In my experience, these germanium-chipped critters of similar vintage can practically slam you through the wall when their volume levels are cranked.
The Verdict
Catalinbread’s StarCrash—with its sturdy enclosure, smooth on/off switch and easy-to-manipulate dials—can compete with any Fuzz Face variant in both price and performance, scoring high points on the latter count. The bias and low-cut dials provide access to a wider-than-usual variety of fuzz tones, and are especially delightful for long, playful solos dappled with gristle, flutter, and sustain. Kudos to Catalinbread for making this pedal not just a reflection of the past, but an improvement on it.
Catalinbread Starcrash 70 Fuzz Pedal - Starcrash 70 Collection
The release of a newRed Panda pedal is something to be celebrated. Each of the company’s devices lets us crack into our signal chains and tweak its inner properties in unique, forward-thinking ways, encouraging us to be daring, create something new, and think about sound differently. In essence, they take us to the sonic frontier, where the most intrepid among us seek thrills.
Last January, I got my first glimpse of the Radius at NAMM and knew that Red Panda mastermind Curt Malouin had, once again, concocted something fresh. The pedal offers ring modulation and frequency shifting with pitch tracking and an LFO, and I heard classic ring-mod tones as the jumping off point for oodles of bold sounds generated by envelope and waveform-controlled modulation and interaction. I had to get my hands on one.
Enjoy the Process
I’ve heard some musicians talk about how the functionality of Red Panda’s pedals are deep to a point that they can be hard to follow. If that’s the case, it’s by design, simply because each Red Panda device opens access to an untrodden path. As such, it can feel heady to get into the details of the Radius, which blends between ring modulation and frequency shifting, offering control of the balance and shift ratios of the upper and lower sidebands to create effects including phasing, tremolo, and far less-natural sounds.
As complex as that all might seem, Red Panda’s pedals always make it easy to strip the controls down to their most essential form. The firmest ground for a guitarist to stand with the Radius is a simple ring-mod sound. To get that, I selected the ring mod function, turned off the modulation section by zeroing the rate and amount knobs, kept the shift switch off and the range switch on its lowest setting. With the mix at noon and the frequency knob cranked, I found my sound.
From there, by lowering the frequency range, the Radius will yield percussive tremolo tones, and the track knob helped me dial that in before opening up a host of phaser sounds below noon. By going the other direction and kicking the rate switch into its higher setting, a world of ring-mod tweaking opens up. There are some uniquely warped effects in these higher settings that include dial-up modem sounds and lo-fi dial tones. Exploring the ring mod/frequency shift knob widens the possibilities further to high-pitched, filtered white noise and glitchy digital artifacts at its extremes.
There are wild, active sounds within each knob movement on the Radius, and the modulation section naturally brings those to life in more ways than a simple knob tweak ever could, delivering four LFO waveforms, a step modulator, two x-mod waveforms, and an envelope follower. It’s within these settings that I found rayguns, sirens, Shepard tones, and futuristic sounds that were even harder to describe.
It’s easy to imagine the Radius at the forefront of sonic experiments, where it would be right at home. But this pedal could easily be a studio device when applied in low doses to give a track something special that pops. The possible applications go way beyond guitars.
The Verdict
The Radius isn’t easy to plug and play, but it’s also not hard to use if you keep an open mind. That’s necessary, too: The Radius is not for guitar players who prefer to stay grounded; this pedal is for sonic-stargazers and producers.
I enjoyed pairing the Radius with various guitar instruments—12-string, baritone, bass—and it kept getting me more and more excited about sonic experimentation. That feeling is a big part of what’s special about this pedal. It’s so open-ended and controllable, continuing to reveal more of its capabilities with use. Once you feel like you’ve gotten something down, there are often more sounds to explore, whether that’s putting a new instrument or pedal next to it or exploring the Radius’ stereo, MIDI, or expression-pedal functionality. Like many great instruments, it only takes a few minutes to get started, but it could keep you exploring for years.
Red Panda Radius Ring Modulator/Frequency Shifter Pedal
