First impressions were interesting. It's a little smaller than I thought it'd be for a two switch pedal. It's got an obvious small builder/ boutique vibe to it but feels very sturdy and well built. The graphic is cool. Is it waves? Is it a blue and white range of hills? Who knows? Frankly it hurts my head to think about it.
The sound is good. It's surprising how good it is for a low gain overdrive considering its name. For the first half of the gain range the sound gradually gets more overdriven in a nice transparent way. The pedal has lots of headroom so it stays dynamic. Once it runs out of headroom it starts to have a bit more character - the sound becomes compressed and the bottom end is growly and raw. It's not polite by any means by the time it gets to max gain. It roars at you. Tonally it feels like a pretty flat EQ, with maybe a bit of a bass boost.
There's lots of output volume on tap. Because the overdrive section has so much headroom the volume changes quite drastically at different gain settings, and I've found unity to be anywhere between 10am and 2pm. The tone knob seems to be the high frequency roll off type. It doesn't make as huge a difference as say a Rat filter knob - It goes from bright to smooth rather than ice picky to dull.
Then there's the burst switch. It's pretty crazy - You use the threshold pot to control the level at which the sound goes from normal to blown out, totally messed up grinding crackling flubbed out horror. that part of the circuit is pre-gain as far as I can tell, so it's still very much controlled by your right hand.
I tried it with my AC30 and it's basically the ideal low/medium gain pedal with that amp. Nice and full sounding and meshes well with the edge of breakup vox cleans. Then tried it through the clean channel of my AC100 and enjoyed the dynamic edge it gave the sound. Boosting a high gain channel is interesting. Because of the bass lift, it gives you quite a dirty blown out sound, without really giving you much more sustain. Not for everyone, but for the right song it'd be an interesting flavour.
I was going to sell it because I didn't think I could really justify holding on to it, but now having spent more time with it I think it might be a cool little tool to keep around.
I don't need the gas
