Monthly Archives: July 2011

Burgers in the rue morgue.

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ProCo Rats!  They’re awesome.  You dont wanna admit that a plain old “distortion” pedal can be so cool, but fuck it is.  These are the same simple circuit as the original rat of the late seventies using a single op-amp gain stage, silicon clipping diodes, and a FET buffer on the output.  They sound shitty and gritty and the tone stack is a wild fucking mule and all of it rules.

The one in gold is for Dann Miller (Weird Party, Black Congress, and formerly The Jonbenet) and the one in copper is for my shelves, at least until a taker comes along.  One of these was my 150th pedal built, but I dont know which.  Go me.

Credit to the klippinest klop, the most practically black, Will Adams, for the post title!!!

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Workin for me mates.

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This here’s a special fuzz box built for the lovely Jana Hunter of Lower Dens.  It’s a clone of a specific Big Muff from the late 70’s known as the “IC” Big Muff.  These were from a short timeframe when the muff was redisgned from its standard 4-transistor layout to one using 3 gain stages provided by two integrated circuits.  Sound like a bunch of fancy mumbo jumbo?  It is, but the point is that the shit sounds different!

These were in fact the black sheep of the Big Muff family and used to be available on the used market for prices ranging from two to four cents.  That is until Siamese Dream came out and everyone realized that they sound pretty dang kickass.  They have same scooped mids that all muffs have, but where the others have a distortion sound that’s really smooth and almost overdrive-y, this one sounds like a crushing wall of disaster.  Its super cool. 

Controls are:  Volume, Tone, Sustain (L-R)

Crampin’

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The concept for this amp is the brainchild of ScottVA over on the Weber amps forum. Its basically the initial preamp from an 18W lite, the tone stack from a 5E3 deluxe, a long-tailed-pair phase inverter, and a cathode biased power section. This one is dual KT-66s and it is a monster sounding amp clocking in somewhere under 30W. 

The idea is to keep things minimal, so the preamp is sparse, as is the iron, and it keeps the whole things pretty light. The sound out of it is amazing. Its not too gainy and has a lot of clean head room with a tele and a little bit less with a les paul.  No matter what youre playing it gets a good bit of crunch at the end of the volume dial. The cleans are VERY blackface bassman to me and that is so kickass. The crunch is straight plexi, with a bit more bassy full-ness due to the KT-66s.  Call it something between a plexi and a tweed bassman/JTM-45.  Brilliant.

Controls are Volume and Tone because you dont need anything else in life.