First of all, Happy new year filled with cool guitar tones!
The Soul Food from Electro-Harmonix continues to intrigue, the sub 100 dollars Klon Centaur clone has been attracting a lot of attention.
Mike Piera aka Analogman himself shows in this video the difference (or rather the lack of) between the two models. The effect guru is even giving some insight as to how the pedal is built at the beginning of the video, very cool:
I must say I did not expect this! The Klon Centaur, holy grail of overdrives for some, overhyped piece of junk for others, is not made any more and fetches ridiculous prices on ebay (close to a thousand american bucks).
Electro-Harmonix has just released the Soul Food, a self-proclaimed Klon Centaur clone which is supposed to give you the same sound for a fraction of the price.
Here is the first Electro-Harmonix sanctioned demo (my opinion after watching it only once, I am not too impressed with the single coil sound but I really like the humbucker tones!):
The Distillery is a boost pedal with many options to tweak the tone. Interestingly, it was designed in collaboration with big names like Billy Gibbons, Buddy Guy, Steve Lukather, etc. with a particular goal in mind: helping these guys get “their” tone through back line amps. And yes even famous gunslingers don’t always get to take their favorite gear on tour (especially when they come to places like Australia). As such, it is as much a tone sculpting tool as it is a boost pedal. Here is a demo involving a Les Paul and some high gain amp. The ToneConcepts website has more demos, check it out.
I have received quite a few product release emails in my inbox lately and most (all?) of them activated my gear acquisition syndrome. Here is a series of posts presenting those items.
First of all, the Dirty Deed distortion pedal is a worthy addition to the Seymour Duncan line of pedals, often overlooked as guitarists think of pickups whenever the brand is mentioned.
Anyway, the Dirty Deed offers a lot of gain on tap and aims at replicating classic rock and hard rock tones. The tone seems really “focused” from the demos I have seen, and to me some features really stand out: it is designed to work with both Fender and Marshall like amps, it seems usable at very low gain and you can run it at 9V or 18V for added saturation and compression. Last but not least it features a bass and a treble knob.
Here is one of the early demos for it:
