Week #2 is here! You could win one of SIX Pedals! This giveaway ends September 26, 2022.
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Catalinbread Soft Focus Shoegaze Reverb Pedal with Chorus, Modulation, and Octave-up
The Soft Focus patch on the Yamaha FX500 was widely used in the ‘90s by early shoegaze bands, most notably Slowdive on Souvlaki. With its roots in that patch, the Catalinbread Soft Focus is intended to be an instant shoegaze button, while addressing the most glaring issues of the original unit. The original unit had a very plug-and-play approach, offering no mix control, a sub-par preamp and a ghastly tone-sucking bypass signal. At its heart, the Soft Focus is a heavily modified plate reverb with adjustable time, which is subsequently split into three. One path contains a “symphonic” chorus modulator, another features a well-appointed octave-up mixed in with the reverb, and the third path leaves the reverb untouched. The Mod knob controls the rate of the chorus on path one, and the Symphony knob controls the level of the octave on path two. All controls are "coupled" to the tone of the reverb to give users an expansive playing field of sounds to discover and fine tune. Our Soft Focus is not an exact recreation but was exhaustively compared with our own FX500; the difference is that a fairly generic fixed-time digital delay is present on the Soft Focus patch. We found that leaving this feature intact ate into the patch’s memory just a little too much for such little payoff, so we leave that addition to you and your favorite delay.
EARTHBOARD EBII-SR Pedalboard System
NEED A SMALL RIG FOR STUDIO WORK, PRACTICE OR CRAMPED GIG SPACES?
The EARTHBOARD EBII-SR is a junior version of the EBII! It has all the innovative features that came with the original EARTHBOARD as well as new built-ins designed to simplify the process of building and using your rig! The world's only magnetically designed and powered complete Effects Pedal System comes with everything you need so you can Focus on the Music, Not the Set-Up. Just add your pedals and patch cables - in under 30 minutes - and you're on your way...
EARTHBOARD EBII-SR System holds up to 5 standard size pedals plus 1 battery and comes with:
5 Gravity Boots (for 4 pedals and the battery)
Gravity Boots come with "fuzzy" hook-side Velcro to easily transfer your pedals from your current board
4 Gravity Boot Tethers and 1 Battery Tether (connecting cables) to provide power from the Gravity Boots to your pedals
Standard 9v, 10,000mA long-lasting, rechargeable battery (includes USB charging cable and mesh carry pouch)
PLUS these unique built-in features:
- undermount Blue LED lights for the cool factor
- 2 Battery Port Input Jacks (side-mounted) for the option to place the battery on the floor next to the board to make room for one more pedal!
- 2 Power Port Input/Output Jacks - 1 on each side for maximum flexibility to: convert to wall power if desired (AC adapter sold separately), power a pedal on the floor next to the board rather than on the board (Requires the Lifeline Tether, sold separately) or connect additional EARTHBOARDs because one battery can power multiple connected EARTHBOARDs (Requires the Lifeline Tether, sold separately)
Compare this complete Effects Pedal Platform to plain ol' pedalboards. It comes with everything you need to get playing - just add your pedals and patch cables! And it's the cleanest, uncluttered rig available because we've eliminated the messy cobweb of daisy chains and power cords! The flexible, modular design allows you to build upon, move and re-arrange pedals and change your rig on the fly. No need to schedule half a day to modify your board…So you can Focus on the Music, not the Set-Up!
Revv Shawn Tubbs Tilt Overdrive Guitar Effects Pedal
The Shawn Tubbs Tilt Overdrive is the tonal culmination of a lifetime in music. Shawn not only needed a practical tone tool to give him the right sound quickly in any musical context - he aimed to combine the greatest vintage amp tones & recorded guitar sounds of all time into one ideal sound. Now that tone is available to you in a compact 9v double pedal with a unique Tilt Boost.
The Expanse
**A harmonic tremolo pedal you can keep on Earth, or get lost in space**
This harmonic tremolo gives you a huge range of tonal possibilities. It can be used as a standalone tremolo, optionally with with some layered on reverb, or you can dial in some complex textured delays and feedback to create dreamy soundscapes. And of course you have everything inbetween.
Darkglass Microtubes Infinity Preamp/Distortion/Audio Interface
If we get to choose only one piece of gear to take on tour: how would we want it to be? The Microtubes Infinity shares the footmark of the Darkglass programmable line, packed with our three legendary Microtubes distortions: B3K, Vintage, and X. It allows multiband compression on every mode and blending Impulse responses between distortions: an infinity of possibilities.
My Evil Twin
Up to one second delay with pitch-shifting modulation. And that modulation! Pitch shifting modulation on the repeats which makes those delays sound MASSIVE! And the modulation is foot-switchable: leave it on for those big clean chords, and turn it off when you kick in the overdrive for that crushing solo.
- Repeats controllable from one to infinite.
- Mix control to perfectly dial in the amount of effect.
- Tone control to adjust the tone of the delayed signal from a hard bright room to a soft dark room.
- Foot-switchable pitch shifting modulation with Speed and Intensity controls.
- Full bypass wth fail-safe relay control; the effect is automatically bypassed if the pedalboard looses power.
- 9V DC input.
A fiery high-gain fuzz that stretches convention.
Wide range of hot-to-blazing fuzz sounds. Cleans up remarkably well for a high-gain device. Momentary footswitch enables quick fuzz blasts. Lifetime warranty.
Would be nice to have external access to the internal trimmers
$149
MAS Effects Sona Fuzz
mas-effects.com
With a very non-traditional Queen of Hearts graphic, sunshine yellow enclosure (one of three available finishes), and gold knobs, the MAS Effects Sona Fuzz is striking. But more important to any guitarist who likes things loud, it’s a high-gain unit that goes beyond traditional buzzy sounds. The Sona Fuzz is the brainchild of pedal builder Mark A. Stratman, a former software engineer who is also the founder of We Build Planes (a community of amateur aircraft builders). Given Startman’s CV, it’s not surprising that the true bypass Sona Fuzz is exceptionally well built. So much so that it comes with a very generous “forever” lifetime warranty that applies even if you bought the pedal secondhand. As well made as it is, though, it’s the sound and its unique place among fuzzes that will find you keeping it around long term.
The Tone Queen Roars
The Sona Fuzz’s layout is straightforward. There are knobs for fuzz, volume, tone, and a “body” toggle switch for the high pass filter, which thins the output or makes it fatter with bottom end. This is particularly useful for tailoring your sound to match single-coils or humbuckers. Under the hood are two internal trimmers. One is a bias control that can be set to achieve a splatty, fractured fuzz. The other is a gain control. As shipped from the factory, it’s set just short of maximum, which MAS Effects deems optimal. This trim pot allows you to get just a little bit more gain, if desired. But as we’ll discover, that’s a little on top of a lot.
I tested the Sona Fuzz using an Ernie Ball/Music Man Axis Sport guitar and a Mesa/Boogie Tremoverb combo. Starting with the fuzz (distortion) control all the way off, the Sona Fuzz was already rumbling, and gain levels sounded equivalent to a typical distortion pedal at about 50 percent gain. Sustain is already excellent at this level, especially with the body switch on. Humbucker-driven power chords, meanwhile, often sounded leaner and sweeter with the body switch off. But even single-coil lead sounds had serious teeth this far south of maximum gain.
This trim pot allows you to get just a little bit more gain, if desired. But as we’ll discover, that’s a little on top of a lot.
Bumping the fuzz control to 11 o’clock changed the character of the pedal, making it more aggressive and generating sustain that pushed solos to screaming. There’s still more aggression to source, though. Maxing the fuzz control makes power chords a wall of doom, and single notes sustain almost endlessly, blossoming into feedback rather than decaying as they do at lower fuzz settings. Putting the body switch in the off position at these high gain settings still offers a cool alternate tonal color. I expected the extra high end to induce less-desirable feedback. But when pushed to these extremes, the Sona Fuzz was still pretty noise-free with nary a squeak or squeal to report. Although, as MAS Effects notes, if you max out the internal gain trim pot, the pedal will get noisy fast.
One of the distinguishing and unexpected features of the Sona Fuzz is that, while it can get downright filthy, the pedal also cleans up when you reduce guitar volume. Even at the maxed-out fuzz setting, when I turned my guitar’s volume down to about 40 percent of full volume the pedal was transformed. Low-register notes got smoother and individual notes in full barre chords were easy to discern. With single-coils I could even get clean enough to play folky triad figures without sounding ridiculous.
The Verdict
The Sona Fuzz is a versatile fuzz pedal that can cover the sonic ground between fuzz and high-gain distortion. Unusual for a fuzz, it uses a soft-touch footswitch that can be operated as a momentary switch, so you seamlessly incorporate the fuzz sound in strategically or rhythmically driven doses, inviting a lot of musical ideas that can take advantage of the ultra-potent fuzz and the major discrepancies between those sounds and clean ones. This is a gain device with a lot of potential.
The latest addition to the MAS Effects lineup is designed to offer wide-ranging tonal control and high-gain fuzz.
Features
- 3 different powder coats available: the standard Natural finish, as well as special limited Sparkle and Sunshine finishes
- "Body" switch adjusts the input filter
- "Tone" knob pans between high pass and low pass filters on the output
- 4 transistor, silicon, extremely high-gain fuzz is designed for simple biasing and predictable, stable behavior
- Soft touch, relay controlled, true-bypass foot switch also allows for hold to momentarily engage or bypass
Sona Fuzz is available in select retailers or directly online at mas-effects.com for $149, and includes free shipping within the U.S. Additional demos are available on the Sona Fuzz product page: mas-effects.com/sona.