Expansive EQ- and drive-shaping capabilities meet studio-level precision. The PG Origin Effects RevivalDRIVE Compact review.
RatingsPros:Extraordinary build quality. Super thoughtful design and execution. Lots of range and nuance in individual controls. Splendid, powerful EQ. Cons: Costs nearly as much as the gold brick its construction evokes. Street: $385 Origin Effects RevivalDRIVE origineffects.com
| Tones:  Ease of Use:  Build/Design: Value: |
Back in 2018, we reviewed the RevivalDRIVE Compact’s big brother—a super-high-quality analog amp-in-a-box unit that generates many authentically Vox-, Fender-, and Marshall-like tones, right down to super-specific rectifier and EQ characteristics. The new Compact version delivers much of the same in a more streamlined unit. But while these approximations of classic amp behaviors and sounds (the RevivalDRIVE is not a modeler) are impressive and convincing, the best feature of the RevivalDRIVE is the measure of creative control and fine-tuning power it affords.
The RevialDRIVE Compact doesn’t overflow with tone-sculpting bells and whistles like the full-featured RevivalDRIVE does. But its streamlined control set is still powerful—and creatively empowering—when it comes to precision tone-sculpting. Indeed, working with the RevivalDRIVE Compact can, at times, feel more like shaping sound with a high-end recording console or, more specifically, like controlling your amplifier output via a high-end studio signal path.
Robust and Range-y
The RevivalDRIVE Compact’s similarities to studio outboard gear aren’t confined to control responsiveness. Like just about everything Origin makes (most notably its line of Cali76 and SlideRig compressors, which actually ape the performance of the UREI 1176 outboard compressor), the RevivalDRIVE also possesses the high-quality feel of an expensive precision studio tool. You know the satisfying sound and feeling of closing a door on a ’70s Mercedes Benz? Well, just about every action you perform on the RevivalDRIVE feels like the stompbox equivalent. Switchwork is smooth and sturdy feeling. Even the EQ mini toggle feels robust. Knob action is smooth and wide raged, and each has a satisfying long-throw taper. The overall fit and finish would likely make even an old Mercedes engineer envious.
The control set itself isn’t especially complicated. But the considerable range in each knob means it takes time to get a feel for its performance parameters, sensitivity, and interactivity with guitar, amp, and the pedal’s other controls.
Some controls are less intuitive than others, too. The post-drive EQ has three positions, but one of them configures the EQ for a power amp or interface, while the other two offer basic brightening or darkening settings to suit your amplifier’s voice. An adjacent knob helps you fine tune the high-frequency response for each setting. These controls aren’t difficult to use, but the degree to which they interact with other elements in your chain isn’t always obvious and requires practice, experimentation, and adjustment by ear and feel rather than visual reference and knob position. The “more/pres” knob, which shapes break-up characteristics, can also feel vague—largely because it helps shape the pedal’s response to picking dynamics as much as any specific tonality. Mastering it, though, yields many extra colors and tones.
The rest of the control array is pretty self-explanatory. Low- and high-band EQ controls and gain and output knobs mirror the functionality of scores of overdrives. The wet/dry blend is more unusual, but intuitive and powerful. While these controls are more familiar, getting a grip on how they work together is a more thought-and-attention-intensive process. Thankfully, the RevivalDRIVE Compact pays many sonic dividends, and deciphering its secrets and navigating its nuances is fun, addictive, and musically rewarding.
The Sensitive Kind
Approaching the RevivalDRIVE compact as if it’s, say, a Tube Screamer, can yield underwhelming results. Setting the controls to noon as a baseline, as you might with a simpler drive or boost, delivers some of the pedal’s least remarkable tones. It does, however, provide a useful departure point from which you can shape and color the output. RevivalDRIVE is a comparatively low-gain affair, and at moderate gain settings you’ll likely have set the output well to the right of noon just to reach unity gain. But this is where the RevivalDRIVE Compact’s likeness to outboard studio gear comes into play, because the super-responsive EQ controls can do as much to shape overdrive color and gain characteristics as the gain and output controls themselves. The low and high controls make the tone filters on simpler drives feel about as sophisticated as a wool blanket over your speaker cabinet. Adding copious-to-maximum high-end output, as a few of the manual’s sample settings suggest, not only gives notes a hot, volatile edge but lends perceptible depth-of-field to the overall sound image and extra headroom for picking dynamics. The RevivalDRIVE Compact’s low-end control, meanwhile, can feel downright alchemical—making 8" speakers feel like 12" or 15" units situated in large-appliance-sized cabinets and providing a deep, complex, and colorful bed of bottom end that never obscures the aerated, detailed fireworks from the top-end.
Needless to say, all of this fine-tuning capability and dimensionality makes the RevivalDRIVE Compact a potentially indispensible studio tool. Once you’ve mastered the EQ and the more nebulously functional but equally critical presence control, you can carve super-precise tones to fill very specific niches in a mix. And, with the invaluable blend control, you can inhabit the familiar tone worlds of your favorite amplifier and judiciously add colors that make it more distinct in a mix—or explosive in a lead situation— without straying from your core tone or completely disrupting your signal chain. (The RevivalDRIVE interacts beautifully with, and often enhances, fuzz, distortion, and complex modulation textures.)
The Verdict
While the RevivalDRIVE Compact is expensive, it could probably effectively replace every overdrive you own. The quality and design are superlative. And while it’s not as easy to master as the average three-knob overdrive, it is light years more dimensional, sensitive, and organic sounding. If you can spare the cash up front, you may make it back by selling all the overdrives the RevivalDRIVE Compact will likely replace.
Matthews and company chase the sound of the most coveted vintage Big Muff and come dang close to hitting the mark—and for less than 100 bucks.
RatingsPros:Sweet, smooth, mid-forward, and super-rich Big Muff tones. Super-accessible price. Cons: Some high gain settings can sound sizzly and extra-compressed. No violet graphics! Street: $99 Electro-Harmonix Ram's Head Big Muff ehx.com
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Big Muff enthusiasts tend to be a bunch of freaks. For starters, most like their fuzz deafeningly massive and impolite, making it fair to classify at least a few as pathologically anti-social. But Electro-Harmonix gave the Big Muff cult other reasons to be obsessively odd—primarily by creating dozens of iterations of the circuit that engender, shall we say, robust opinions and loyalties, even over the subtlest differences.
But if there's one thing that almost every Big Muff fan can agree on, it's that a great Ram's Head—the colloquial name given to a generation of Muffs from the early-to-mid-'70s—is a magical thing. It's taken a while for Electro-Harmonix to get around to a formal reissue of the Ram's Head. But after a few very satisfying weeks with this pedal, it seems plausible that the time was spent getting it just right. It possesses most of the virtues that make a Ram's Head great. And when you consider the sub-$100 price, it's hard to not be impressed at what the Ram's Head Big Muff delivers.
Blue Mood Muff
EHX says the new, nano-sized Ram's Head is based on the now-legendary “violet" iteration—a variant built around 1973 and distinguished by vivid colors (a striking violet among them) and a particular component mix that generates a smooth, detailed, and slightly mid-forward voice.
A peek at the circuit reveals few overt clues about how the new Ram's Head differs from other mass-produced, four-transistor Big Muffs, or how it might achieve any special Ram's Headiness. There's four prominent but generic BC547 transistors arrayed on a through-hole printed circuit board. And if it weren't for the handsome reproduction of original Ram's Head graphics on the circuit board and enclosure, you'd have little reason to suspect it was special.
But you need to only plug in the new Ram's Head alongside a bunch of classic Big Muffs and first-rate clones to hear how impressively it generates the sounds, textures, and tactile response that distinguish the Ram's Head.
Towering Tones
I don't own an original Ram's Head Big Muff, though I've had the pleasure of playing a few. I do have a few very nice Ram's Head clones, however: an original bubble-font Sovtek Big Muff, several Sovtek clones, and a few triangle Muff clones. My favorites among these were used as reference for this review of the new Ram's Head.
Old Big Muff circuits are notoriously inconsistent, making pursuit of a perfectly representative specimen folly and a game of chance. But one of the most striking things about the Ram's Head—both in legend, and in this newest version—is how often it seems to borrow the best attributes of each Big Muff version.
In general terms, the new Ram's Head is growlier in the midrange than most Russian-style Muffs (which are famously extra-scooped and wooly) and “triangle" versions (which are often more focused, fizzier, and white-hot in the high-mids). Sustained single notes are smoother and more sonorous than the output from triangle versions, and tend to split the difference between a triangle's silicon fizziness and a Russian-type's cabernet-smooth contours. It marks an absolute sweet spot, in my opinion, and a reason for Animals-era Gilmour fans to take note.
Fuzz Flights and Muffy Pairings
One of the unsung virtues of most Muffs is how adaptive they are to wildly divergent gear pairings (an uncommon quality among vintage fuzzes). The Ram's Head prominently bears this distinction. Lead lines positively sing with thin single-coils, and become smoother and more vocal still when paired with humbuckers. It's quite happy with either pickup type, even at the highest gain and tone settings.
With respect to amps, some of the Ram's Head's most distinctive qualities, particularly the detail and air in the midrange, are less distinctive in Fender-style pairings. (Many Ram's Head tones were made downright Russian with a Bassman downstream.) With a brighter Marshall in the mix, though, you can more distinctly hear the Ram's Head's midrange sparkle and throatier voice.
Stacking the Ram's Head with boost and overdrive, meanwhile, can yield fantastic-to-messy results. The Ram's Head's intrinsic midranginess can make some compound Muff/OD tones cluttered and compressed, where a Tube Screamer and a Russian Muff might dovetail into a balanced whole. On the other hand, more dynamic overdrives and boosts with flexible EQ options can help you sculpt very precise fuzz tones that leverage the Ram's Head's even, well-rounded voice.
The Ram's Head's balanced and blazing lead tones also cut beautifully through thick modulation, situated both up and downstream from the Muff. (I used a Moog flanger and vintage Small Stone for these tests.) And though the Ram's Head doesn't lend the same oomph and definition to detuned guitars that you get from a mid-scooped Russian version, it still lends explosiveness to throbbing low-D and C-string tones.
To the extent the Ram's head does lower-gain distortion tones, it excels. Placing the Ram's Head's gain control at noon yields some of the smoothest high/mid-gain fuzz you'll hear from the Muff family. (I often use such settings to tame the high-mid spikes that can plague Big Muff/Marshall combinations, and, in this context, this Ram's Head shines.)
The Verdict
At 99 bucks, the EHX Ram's Head Big Muff is a steal. It handily approximates the sound and feel of much more expensive clones and is surprisingly versatile for a fuzz that many regard as inflexible. Whether you are an experienced Muff user or a newbie eager to explore the myth of the Ram's Head, this new nano-version is both an impressive performer and a representative point of departure.
Watch the First Look:
This LFO-driven tone mangler expands the vocabularies of expression-pedal-enabled stomps. The PG TWA Side Step review.
Side Step played with Moog MF Flange, Fender Vibro Champ, and Fender Telecaster recorded with Shure SM57, Apogee Duet, and GarageBand.
RatingsPros:Adds unexpected textures to pedals you already have. Cons: Results can feel random. Space-intensive. Expensive for what it is. Street: $179 TWA Side Step godlyke.com | Tones: Ease of Use:  Build/Design: Value: |
I love a pedal that fixes a problem I didn’t know I had. In this case, how to make some of my weirdest sounding stomps and textures even weirder. TWA’s Side Step accomplishes these feats by using an LFO to control the functions and variables you would ordinarily control with an expression pedal.
The Side Step does more than just get bizarre. Depending on which of the eight LFO waveforms you choose (sine and sawtooth are pretty predictable), the rate you select (via the rate knob or tap tempo,) and the effect you use it with, you can use the Side Step to fashion, say, rhythmic feedback rises in a delay or fast, choppy filter frequency sweeps in a filtered fuzz. Used within these and more conventional frameworks, the Side Step can be a great riff- and hook-writing tool.
Of course, it’s also a fantastic chaos generator with, for example, a peaky, resonant flanger and one of the Side Step’s more radical waveforms. Introducing these textures via the Side Step’s bypass switch can generate a lot of musical drama on top of already unusual tone colors. The Side Step is expensive for what it is, especially given that you can only use it with a single, dedicated pedal. But its ability to deliver genuine “where did that come from!?” moments in performance, and its utility in studio situations, will, for many users, make the Side Step invaluable.
Test Gear: Fender Jazzmaster, Fender Telecaster Deluxe with Curtis Novak Widerange pickups, blackface Fender Vibrolux, Fender Vibro Champ, Moog MF Delay, Moog MF Flange.