Ready, Aim, Fuzz!… the Blackout Effector’s Musket
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The Blackout Effectors Musket fuzz is touted as a highly-tweakable take on the classic Big Muff stomp offering controls to enable the end-user to apply a clean boost, scoop out the mids and/or limit the amount of bass in the signal among other things. The pedal along with its sister stomp, the Fix’d Fuzz, is hand-built in Vancouver, Canada by pedalsmith Kyle Tompkins. There have been many iterations of Muff clone hit the market, but the promise of so much control over the signal made WTDP? very interested in taking a closer look at the Musket and its potential fire power.
The Algal Bloom from pedal upstarts Fuzzhugger has been getting a lot of attention in the forums lately. As the pedal has landed in more hands it has gained a growing reputation for being a full-bodied, texture-filled fuzz that offers the right mix of aggression and smoothness. I have become quite the fuzz fan lately, tending to move more toward the tuneful cream machines than the circuit-bend glitch boxes… so the Algal Bloom was definitely on my list to try out. When Fuzzhugger offered to send us one to put through its paces, I jumped at at the chance. I was hoping to find a pedal that could move from a hairy wall of doom tone to a more discreet and hummy fuzz, but did I?
You like Barber Electronics pedals, but really wish you could get two of their famous tone machines in one small enclosure? Well, let me introduce you to the B-Custom Dual Discrete. The Dual Discrete are customized, highly tweakable dual overdrive pedals. Choose between three enclosure colors, choose your knobs (go ahead, mix and match colors!), then choose any two of Barber’s three-knob overdrive units – the Direct Drive Super Sport, Tone Pump, LTD, LTD SR or Direct Drive LG. Each Dual Discrete is hand made by Ronni in the Barber Custom Shop! The true-bypass Dual Discretes measure only 3.7″ x 5.7″ x 1.5″. and are priced at $349.95.
Mellowtone top man Eric Edvalson is conducting a dutch auction on ebay for two custom Wolf Computers fuzz pedals in the color of the winners’ choice. A portion of the proceeds – 20% according to the company – will be donated to Habitat for Humanity, which builds homes for people in need. You can check out the auction 
Ok, this is pretty cool. A guy by the name of Abram Taylor has made a one-off overdrive pedal out of a toy car resulting in a pretty sweet sounding stomp he calls the Wide Open Throttle overdrive. According to the builder, the pedal itself is based loosely on the Tubescreamer circuit, but does have some differences. The steering wheel operates the drive, so fully off can be a clean boost and it adds gain as you make a right hand turn. The Supercharger is a 555 timer circuit, which is only on when the pedal is depressed. The gear shift changes a capacitor between first and second gear. See a video of the inventive stomp after the jump!
Towards the end of 2008, Subdecay Studios released the F-Bomb, a FET-based high output fuzz box the promised heaps of gain and versatility beyond its simple appearance. It was the second half of that statement that made us curious to get our hands on one. The world has got plenty of fuzzes. In fact, many in internet circles unofficially dubbed last year ‘The Year of the Fuzz’ since so many new offerings hit the streets from boutique builders and high volume manufacturers alike. Could Subdecay make the F-Bomb more that just another fuzz, and perhaps double as a high-gain distortion pedal as well?
It’s been a dozen years or so since the bassist Matt Bissonette, drummer Jorge Palacios and guitarists Doug Bossi and George Bernhardt released the first Mustard Seeds CD – a self-titled, riff-heavy rocker that took its cues from bands ranging from King’s X to The Beatles. In 2009, the Seeds return with their third record, simply dubbed III – and it’s probably their best work to date. The 12-tune disc is rich with heavy riffs, soaring melodies and an overall musicality that has gone missing from much of the mainstream music releases these days. WTDP? had the honor of catching up with Bossi and Bernhardt recently to discuss the new record, their gear and their future.
German switcher specialists Lehle is offering up a new, compact high-end preamp dubbed Sunday Driver. The box features JFET-based circuitry and provides two modes of operation, with selection via a mode selector switch with gold-plated contacts. In Driver mode, the guitar signal is amplified, with no modification, at the input impedance of a guitar amp, eliminating losses on the route through leads and effects. The signal remains strong and clear, retaining its full dynamics. The Sunday setting multiplies input impedance by four, bringing out previously inaudible details and, as gain increases, imparting to the guitar sound an unmistakable warmth.
Last Friday, I drug my sick, lifeless body out to catch the Sonnier Brothers rock Danelectro’s Guitar Bar here in town. Now, yes, they had just played my dining room two weeks previous, but that was an intimate acoustic set… this was the full-on electric rock-and-roll show. Given the pedigrees of all involved, it was no shock to see dUg Pinnick of King’s X, Wally Farkas and Alan Doss – both ex-Galactic Cowboys and former Dead Horse frontman Michael Haaga in the crowd. Those who stayed the night got not only the treat of hearing most of SBB’s catalog, but also a special bonus in the wee-hours as Pinnick et al took the stage. Did you miss it? We’ve got you covered after the jump!
Promoter extraordinaire Loni Spector is gearing up for the 3rd annual New York Amp Show to be held 9 May. The show brings together amp manufacturers from the four corners of the globe to show off their tone machines and various other fineries. This year, Loni has added a pedal designers panel to complement the ‘Tone Wizards’ amp panel. Participants in the pedal panel include ‘Sarge’ Gistinger from Creation Audio Labs, Alphonso Hermida from Hermida Audio, David Koltai with Pigtronix, Mike Piera aka Analog.Man and Jeff Purchon with Gig-FX! More panelists to be announced. Stay tuned to 
Jayson over at Gaspedal has re-released the dual channel Dumb Bell pedal with new tone and gain controls added to the circuit. According to the builder, these are not heavy handed controls that you will hear on a lot of pedals but rather are for making subtle changes to tailor the Dumb Bell to your amp of choice. The gain control effects both channels and enables the pedal to get more and less gain than the original. The pedal, which also is slightly larger than the original, has a new board layout to further lower noise floor including additional power filtering. The new Dumb Bell is priced at $225.
Bob Reinhardt of Reinhardt Amps is going to be making a couple of pedals in the near future – a ProCo Rat clone and a boost stomp. The initial plan is offer mainly dirt pedals, but Bob said he can see a chorus in the not too distant future as well. For the Rat clone, he is targeting a a killer original big box Rat circuit tonally. He also will smooth out some of the minor issues with the classic stomp (battery adapter, etc…) The price for the pedal is expected to be around $199. About a month after the Rat clone, Bob plans to offer up a ‘kick ass’ boost pedal. More info on that when we get it.
Keeley Electronics, which had its headquarters in Edmond, Oklahoma, damaged by fire last month, is now back up and running at full capacity at its secondary offices in Oklahoma City. “The worst of the damage happened to our parts inventory,” says owner Robert Keeley. “I had some rare treasures there, for sure, but nothing that would stop the world from spinning or Keeley Electronics from operating. The stock of built pedals and unmodified pedals all made it without any damage.” Full production is now taking place at the second Keeley facility which specializes in road/ATA/flight cases and Keeley guitar pickups. 
The pedal gurus at Malekko Heavy Industry have set a March release date for the latest offering from its laboratory – the Spring Chicken reverb. The result of many years of development, the Spring Chicken succeeds where other stomps have failed – cramming a sweet sounding spring reverb into a compact, pedalboard-friendly enclosure. The Malekko Spring Chicken is a spring reverb emulator with a single knob control that operates on either a 9vDC negative tip power supply or a 9v battery. The lads say the stomp should be in stores by the end of March and carry a price tag of around $150.
The second coming of Way Huge Electronics may have been the most talked about event in the pedal world during 2008. The idea that the brains behind such sought after stomps as the Aqua Puss delay and Green Rhino overdrive was returning to the market after an almost decade-long hiatus was more than enough to set the gear forums buzzing. Way Huge mastermind Jeorge Tripps and Jim Dunlop teamed up to resurrect the brand with three new pedals released last October – the Fat Sandwich Harmonic Saturator, Pork Loin Soft Clip Injection and the Swollen Pickle Mk II Jumbo Fuzz. WTDP? got our hands on the latter. In this fuzz-filled world, is it worthy of the hype?