Pedal geeks i need u (help jjjusten make decisions about awesome pedals for his store)

so I am about to add this dudes stuff to the mix, super reasonable and imo super fucking cool low rent handbuilt fuzz box/overdrive/feedback loop stuff. but i am audio fatigued/overwhelmed having listened to fuzz samples all day, so if i could enlist yer advice that would be cool.

www.noisemakereffects.com

mod is dumb w/html

http://noisemakereffects.com/Noisemaker_Effects/Home.html

also on the futurity list hopefully

http://www.catalinbread.com/Pedals
http://www.subdecay.com/

consider vfe pedals. great, extremely well priced

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJ5fi4HKuHo&feature=share&list=PL2466C0B24FB63E4A

this is high on the list of why subdecay is on the list btw

Vfe looks interesting for sure - what I really need is mod stuff more than distortion/od/fuzz at the moment, so idk if they would be down with me cherry picking all the mod stuff or not. I will contact them tho

Ok this dude is also going on the list - idiotbox effects.

http://sinkholetexas.com/idiotbox-lo-fi-electronic-instruments-effects

oh shit just ordered 11 noisemaker pedals.

back and forth emails/phone calls made me pretty sure this is the kind of dude i want to support - he's definitely in it for the love of making pedals, and pretty committed to the idea that his stuff shouldn't cost more than reasonable labor + parts. the pedal community could use more people like this, and i wish more independent stores could make the leap from understanding what it's like to do what we do to supporting the manufacturing equivalent of that.

order for the curious:
3.14
crush fuzz
donner party
noise invaders (this is so so awesome)
chimera
four horsemen
five
soviet
arbiter
a-ok boost
infinity loop

really wished i could buy the "dead hipster" based on name and graphics alone, but i wasn't that crazy abt how it sounded

no dead hipsters?

lol xpost

I heart these guys a lot: http://walrusaudio.com

also why the fuck aren't more pedal dudes dumping youtube and doing the soundcloud clip idea? makes so much sense, sounds better, and i need another clip of some dude visually rocking out in front of an amp like i need a hole in the head.

i know this isnt a measure of pedal, and i hate the handpainted artisinal blah blah blah collectors market, but dammmmn those walrus pedals look good.

speaking of which, apparently the noisemaker dude does all his own graphics and according to one guy i know who did some snooping is all of 23 years old.

goddamn kids.

fyi if peeps know local peeps that do good stuff and want to start spreading their wings, this is my goal for the next few years. well that and not starving. and finding a location that doesn't still have the patented mr. movies carpet that we inherited when we moved into the shithole where we currently reside (this is also in the works. i have said too much.)

Those Subdecay pedals are really wild. Thing about things like that they look really fun to mess with but trying to get them into tunes and use them live isn't quite as easy to do.

It's definitely not a total unknown company but the pedal I am currently all geeked on is a Keeley Nova Wah I got used a few months back off the Bay. You can make some cool nasty guitar tones with that box.

Really geeked out over this guy: http://skreddypedals.com/skreddy_pedals_lunar_module_mini_deluxe.htm

that skreddy dude is a really good upstanding guy too, he knows his stuff.

also i just ordered every pedal that earthquaker makes why because i am insane

http://www.earthquakerdevices.com/

Earthquaker! Local Akron boys make good. I have their Ghost Echo reverb. thumbsup.gif

Earthquaker Grand Orbiter will be my next purchase once paychecks start rolling in again

I'd really like to get my mitts on an Organizer. That is a crazy goddamn pedal.

Those Earthquaker pedals sound and look really cool.

I want the Hoof fuzz pedal and the Tone Job pedal looks like could be really handy. That guy gets a cool Tony Iommi tone with the two together in the one demo.

http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/542057_401474583251529_409196440_n.jpg

STEP ONE

i guess i wont be getting much done this morning.

guys, the organizer. holy shit.

I've been wanting an Organizer so bad. I'm going to probably have to sock away money every week to do it. What do you like best about it? What are your impressions?

that thing is crayzee

the lag control is kind of where the magic happens, seems to delay the effected signal while passing the direct signal through untouched. also, they managed to pull off the magic POG thing where chords roll through it with no glitching whatsoever, but its a very different beast than the micropog. one thing to note is that even with the choir control all the way down, there is still some swirliness to the up and down octaves.

i might take another go at the rainbow machine here in a bit, the first time i tried one i was more baffled than anything, and i like weird stuff!

ha was going to ask about that one. it's called rainbow machine!

i saw a vid of it one time and my first thought with it was what it could to do non-guitar stuff

i think i am a little closer to decoding it but man, that thing is crazy. non-guitar use might be kind of interesting actually, too bad i turn stupid the minute i touch anything w/o strings on it.

haha wow, a crate of new pedals pretty much = me not getting a damn thing done at work apparently. feel pretty solid abt all of these now that ive had some time with them. speaker cranker is one of the best dirt boost/od one knobs ive heard in a long long time.

and in a few days, we get to do the whole thing over again with a box full of noisemaker pedals.

also protip for other manufacturers: if you include a pound of your brands locally roasted coffee blend with your orders, you can probably have all of my money forever.

like seriously "earthquaker blend coffee" stamped right on the damn bag. someone up there was from ohio, its from a coffee shop named bent tree i guess?

the coffee roaster is in Kent, Ohio. Never had it! Let me know how it is.

https://benttreecoffee.com/

!!! http://walrusaudio.com/products-page/pedals/janus/

earthquaker blend seemed like pretty decent coffee until my wife said "this is good but theres a weird taste of hot dogs to it" and now i cant untaste that idea.

OH LOOK

http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/431588_404472012951786_895742628_n.jpg

another thursday down the drain

ok so right off the bat, the 3.14 is one of the best muff-style fuzzes i have ever heard, the noise invader is awesome, and the donner party is batshit fucking crazy.

ok arbiter is also killer

and...i apparently cant stop myself, so I am working up an idiotbox order over the next week.

want them all

http://sinkholetexas.com/idiotbox-lo-fi-electronic-instruments-effects

/r/pedalshots

sold out of the rainbow machine and the disaster transport already, sold the chimera from noisemaker the day i got it in, perhaps i am not insane only time will tell

xpost is that cool person code i do not understand

um okay I want the Pac-Man one just because it has Pac-Man on it, I don't even know how to play well enough to even consider introducing pedals into my guitar universe

xp: it was a bad reddit joek

see this is my level of ignorance wrt reddit! which i am happy about. and yeah the pacman graphic is awesome, also dig all the star wars references and the fact that the guy is not wandering down the old bullshit path of pedal buzzwords.

The -D4 is a straight-up distortion pedal. Muthafucka say wha? That ain’t cool and booteek! It should be a non-coloring transparent overdrive or some other bullshit internet forum descriptor. Well, this is exactly what it says.

my kind of guy

look I only learned about subreddit designations in the wake of the outing of the dude who was moderating the ones where ppl were posting pics of random teen girls for others to put in their wank bank, I'm not very deep into this particular rabbit hole

just bought one of everything from idiotbox effects.

i swear that after this i will be done

although these dudes: http://www.stationaudio.net/

goddamnit

Boss RV-3

alltimer.

I used to have an alesis nanoverb, I loved that thing. Great hall sounds.

I don't know if they're still cheap but the Digitech Polara sounds good, lots of options without getting too deep into the weeds on them.

I don’t know why I used past tense up there. I still have the Flint - it’s an awesome pedal that just happens to be on the opposite coast right now

oh milo, that's a really good suggestion! too bad that whole line of digitech stuff went out of production (though a quick search on reverb and it's not gotten outrageously expensive for second hand ones). the polara had some really strong conventional sounds (especially the spring — really good!), but then it also had some more weird modes like the halo setting. super unique and versatile.

i keep wanting to play a flint, but that strymon stuff is just too expensive to be going out on whims for.

i think i've finally gotten tired of delay. never thought it would happen, but i knew it was over when i looked at my trusty old bicycle delay and found myself asking, "do i really need this one? like REALLY need it?" seems like new delays coming out anymore are just focusing on presets and weird glitchy processed repeats. that stuff is fine, but meh i don't really have any interest in making those kinds of sounds. i bought a boss dd-200 last year and that has been pretty much my go-to ever since. i'm boring now i guess.

Another Digitech reverb that gets a lot of praise is the Supernatural, especially for the spring reverb.

Source Audio is also really good.

I have a Marshall Reflector too and like it. Have had it a long time and remember doing a lot of comparing with the EHX Holy Grail and maybe a Boss one when deciding what to buy. Clearly came out on top.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVbeaDwDcWg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syruqlA0hpM

"Key Moments:
17:00 Kevin pleases himself.
19:20 J seems to nod approval.
23:32 J ‘Let me take over’.
26:23 Kevin imposes more knob twists."

Ok I generally don't use pedals, but for my current live setup I want a stereo delay with a tap function (I mainly use a Kaoss Quad, but sometimes need to trigger a delay when I'm playing drums and don't have a spare hand). Is there a reason I shouldn't get this suspiciously cheap one? Sorry for the amazon link:
https://www.amazon.com/FLAMMA-FS22-Stereo-Effects-Function/dp/B08BZ518HD

The only thing I can think of is, if I had a stereo delay I would probably want it to ping-pong.

I don't need that, mostly my concern is that I'd be sending a stereo signal through it (triggering wavs from a sample pad mostly) and I don't want them summed to mono?

Have only heard good things about Flamma stuff but the reverb types that come on that unit would make me hesitate (swell, modulated and shimmer, hmmm). Delay types sound a bit more useable but i dont know what 'real echo' is supposed to be.

Mooer D7 X2 might be a good cheapish alternative - no reverb but lots of delay type options, tap tempo, true stereo

Also its pink

Does the ping pong ting too

https://www.thomann.co.uk/mooer_d7_x2_delay.htm

Thank you!!

i think i want one of these reverse pedals. i have a DD-6 that had this functionality and it somehow disappeared, but the delay settings still work. i don't need more delay but it also seems like an investment for one cool trick. everything i've read says the Danelectro Talk Back does this trick the best, but it's actually more than just buying a new DD-8. Does the DD-8 do a completely wet reverse? any other cool reverse pedals out there?

I ended up getting the Flamma btw, seemed just a better suited and more colorful for my purposes. I've read you need to keep the gain staging under control for non-guitar uses, will report back after I try it on some gigs next week. :)

a modern, cheap classic for all kinds of reverb / delay / modulation (including reverse) is the Zoom CDR-70. The newer model is $110 right now.

sorry, the model is actually 70CDR (newer one is 70CDR+)

Maybe I should have gone with a different option, but I have a minor mystery. When I run my sample pad directly into the pedal, it works. But when I put it into the fx send loop (send from mixer > Kaoss pad > pedal > back into stereo aux return on mixer), I get zero fx from the pedal. The signal is clearly passing through and sounds fine, but the fx just aren't happening. All I can think is that the signal from the Kaoss pad isn't strong enough to trigger the delay pedal, no matter how much level I send. Does that make sense??

does the pedal work ok if it's the only thing in the loop?

Does the pedal have stereo out?

Yeah, it does. I'm not sure I tried it in the loop without anything else, I'll give that a shot (I was definitely maxing out the level I could send from the channel to the fx loop though, didn't seem to matter).

saw this on reddit btw:

pedalpicker.com

web app that can help pick out pedals for specific songs. Can't vouch for the veracity of every search but on more popular ones it seems to be headed in the right direction

Ohio-based EarthQuaker Devices CEO reveals the business is at risk of going bankrupt amidst tariff uncertainty
- https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ohio-based-earthquaker-devices-ceo-082632127.html
- https://www.beaconjournal.com/story/business/2025/05/18/tariffs-could-bankrupt-akron-based-earthquaker-devices-ceo-julie-robbins-us-senate-testimony/83647692007/ (loads in Bypass Paywalls Clean)

Current pedal collection as of today. The board up front is my current "gigging" board despite not having any gigs.

https://qc-ckb.s3.amazonaws.com/ilx/et_pedals_2025.jpg

Nice! I need a new distortion pedal to pair with my big mufff. Is the earth Quaker Hizumitas any good?

nice! rv3 and zoom ultra fuzz! you could probably buy a semi decent car for the value of those two Lovetones.

I took the Lovetones and the Sonic Boom when I had to evacuate for the Eaton Fire. I've had the RV-3 for decades and would immediately replace it with another if I had to.

Nice! I need a new distortion pedal to pair with my big mufff. Is the earth Quaker Hizumitas any good?

Isn't the Hizumitas the Wata pedal?

Yeah I believe so

i have the hizumitas. it's a fun pedal but it's actually got a lot in common with a big muff so it may be redundant unless you're a real fuzz sicko

Thanks CAD. Anyone have a particular distortion pedal they like to pair with the big muff? I used to have one of those boss octave pedals that had a distortion setting that sounded cool with it but it broke

I might be weird about liking common/classic pedals more than unique ones, but I think a plain old Rat or Turbo Rat sounds great into a Big Muff, if you don't crank the Rat too much. The Muff is a little scooped in the midrange and the Rat is the opposite, so you end up getting more presence and solidity from the fuzz. If that's what you're looking for.

Could do the same with any number of mid-heavy overdrives, distortions, or imitation Klons, though. Or any random thing and an EQ pedal. I am possibly just an oaf but I feel like half the things people agonize over with drives can be handled with a cheap EQ? People are out there talking about how they do or don't like $400 pedals for all these subtle frequency-balance reasons, and it's like ... I personally would stop and check if spending $30 on a used Boss equalizer took care of this.

I remember reading in the late 90s how one/both guitarist(s) in Hum used bass distortion pedals to “beef up their sound” but I never tried it out myself.

Xp yeah I found a Reddit thread covering the same question and a lot of folks were mentioning EQ. A cheap answer is a good one

This is a review of a distortion pedal with an EQ built in, but the same applies if you use a separate distortion pedal and EQ pedal (review starts at 5:30)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsSlfr4oBjI
I feel that nearly all situations where a distortion or fuzz doesn't have quite enough INSERT_FREQUENCY_RANGE_HERE can be fixed with an EQ in the chain.

not a pedal, but I've been using a Warm audio 1073 preamp/eq and man oh man, the EQ on that thing for guitar and bass. super musical and beautiful.

Alternatively, if you don't want to go with a dedicated EQ pedal some overdrives could fit in here too. Walrus' Voyagers are OK for boost, but terrific if you think of it as an always-on tone-shaper.

my live board is pretty simple, just an OD/boost, a fuzz or two, and a light reverb/slapback delay, but i have so many options for each of those steps and i keep swapping things out trying to find a good sound. so i've been going a little pedal-crazy (for me) lately - i found the pedal trade subreddit and swapped out a couple pedals i never used for a couple of reverb options - pretty happy with the danelectro spring reverb i ended up with.
i've also been trying different fuzz options, trying to find something that will effectively cut through in a live setting without getting overcompressed or buried in the mix. i've been enjoying the fender pelt v2, which comes closest so far to what i'm looking for but is still not perfect. i have a zvex mastotron which i love the sound of but it just doesn't work live.
i just ordered this thing which is a copy of the crowley double hot cake, which is what andy cohen from silkworm was using at their reunion shows. maybe it'll fix everything.

maybe try putting an EQ pedal in your chain to boost some of the mid range to help it cut through and also to cut out some of the low end mud? would help to boost the overall volume too

yeah i've tried that, also putting a tube screamer in the chain as a boost with mids, but it really offends my pedal sensibilities to have to turn multiple pedals on simultaneously. i like things to be simple. i just want to turn one pedal on and get the sound i want. i think i might be moving towards stacking overdrives instead of using a fuzz at all, today in practice i was using a cheap hot cake clone i already have for the always-on grit and then adding a turned-up xotic ep boost for higher-gain situations and that sounded better than using the fuzz. that's why i have high hopes for the double doughnut linked above.

i always liked that approach when i was playing, having a versatile overdrive always on and then a second pedal to take it up a notch

Don't know if this counts as simple, but some of those pedals could go in a loop? For a while my dumb fix was using a couple cheap ABY pedals to do that: I'd have the barely-there overdrive, then split into branches, one of which had two more gain pedals on it, so ... it could do some of those larger hops between gain levels by switching over. (Sometimes that meant turning on the right pedals before switching to their loop, but I found that kind of fun, since it would end with a one-stomp changeover that flipped way more pedals than I had feet.) I guess the non-boneheaded way to do this would be with the Boss Line Selector, or a simple loop switcher — lots of cheap ones out there, and I think Earthquaker makes a good two-loop one for, like, $100. I can't imagine doing a whole fancy-pants switching system, but I did manage to basically wrap my head around one side loop for skipping between gain levels.

yeah that still sounds like a pain in the ass lol. i might do it if i found some perfect fuzz tone by combining fuzz with EQ and boost but i never hit on what i was looking for, even if it did cut through a little better.

It was also not ideal noise-wise, but that was probably the cheap splitters I was using! At some point I saw that there's an Ernie Ball expression pedal for panning that lets you fade between two outputs, and it seemed like it'd be some real shoegazey fun to sweep back and forth between two different chains or two different fuzz sounds ... but then I was playing mostly clean for a while so I took the whole thing apart.

I do wish more fuzz pedals had really robust midrange controls built in. The Big Muff Deluxe is great for this — you can dial in midrange boost amount, frequency, and bandwidth, stomp the mid boost on and off, even sweep the frequency with an expression pedal — but I've never felt like I 100% needed to spend money on it. What I do kind of love is the cheap Joyo Rat clone, the Splinter, which I currently have stacked after an actual Rat: the real Rat does medium cutting distortion, then the Splinter can turn that wider and fuzzier without losing the sharp nasty midrange. (I have two stages before that — tiniest dab of grit from a Timmy and a Boss for light overdrive — but sometimes it feels like a chain of just three or four Rats at increasing gain levels would possibly do everything I wanted.)

there are some fuzzes with midrange controls or boosts but I haven’t found one that does the robot Velcro fuzz sound I want, they mostly seem to be in that big muff category. dod carcosa is another one that gets a lot of praise.

I have an old rat that stopped working a long time ago and I don’t know anything about electronics so I just gave up on it. But I opened it up last week and there’s a very obvious disconnected wire inside. I’m hoping that once I find my solder it’ll be an easy fix.

Wait, the Mastotron is kind of like a thicker Fuzz Factory, right? They do have some newer Fuzz Factories with more tone controls, if that stands any chance of making the sound work on stage. (Also the internet is telling me Annie Clark used a Mastotron for spitty fuzz sounds but switched it for a cranked-up Interstellar Overdriver Deluxe from DBA, which does seem very ... cutty? Pricey, but it does have two channels, so maybe the value's good if they're both useful.)

I've obviously a Rat partisan but yeah, solder that thing up! Not likely to do Velcro, obviously, but I do think they stack up really well with other things to get fuzzy sounds with weight and cut to them, instead of stomping on something like a Muff and having the guitar disappear into flubby scooped powdery fizz. I spent a while stacking a Rat and a DS-1, and it was like the cheapest, most generic combo I'd ever heard sound that satisfying. (It could also make the 90s alt-rock "stomp DS-1 for chorus" thing actually work and get bigger instead of fizzing out, so it became tempting to sit around playing along with ... extremely dated records.)