Guitar Noize - guitar news, crazy guitar designs and cool guitar videos

In a recent interview with Premier Guitar magazine Paul Gilbert spoke about a new pedal he was working on with Majikbox called the same name as his latest album “Fuzz Universe” well here the updated front page of Majikbox’s website. The pedal’s features are:

Specialized overdrive and boost in one box - Individual on / off footswitches
Custom taper tone control for easy access to all of Paul’s favorite overdrive tones.
Paul’s preferred bass cut off frequency, optimized for pure shred.
True Bypass

Paul suggested taking the tone recipe used in the modification of his personal Body Blow, further changing the tone pot taper, adding the Venom Boost circuit in the same box and creating the Fuzz Universe pedal. What a great idea! If you were looking for an overdrive / boost for killer rhythm tones and ultimate shredability, look no further!

Check out Paul Gilbert demoing the Majikbox Fuzz Universe below:

Pre-orders now being taken but production officially begins on October 1 2010 – pre-ordered units will ship in early November. Customers placing orders directly through the Majik Box website via PayPal on or before October 1 will receive a free limited edition Paul Gilbert Fuzz Universe pick with their pedal. This pedal retails for $279.99.

Check out the Majikbox website.

via Metalichika

Check out my review of Fuzz Universe.

MI Effects (sister company to MI Amplification) are boutique effects manufacturer based in Sydney, Australia and they’re effects are popular all over the world due to their range of top quality overdrive and distortion pedals such as the Tube Zone, Crunch Box and Neo Fuzz. Now MI Effects are launching their latest pedal the MI Effects Compressor. This is probably the hardest product demo I have ever recorded because first of all I am uploading to YouTube which will add its own compression to the sound but also because this is a very versatile and beautifully transparent Compressor. You don’t necessarily notice a compressor when you hear a recording as it may be used as a subtle enhancement to make your guitar more punchy, the MI Compressor certainly did a great job of making my Black Pearl amp sound a lot tighter especially overdriven.

I have recorded a few examples using the compressor’s built in Noise Gate, something I have personally never seen on a Compressor before and a really great idea as Compressor’s amplify any background noise along with your guitar signal so if you are using a distortion pedal you could place this after it in the chain and use it to control your noise as well as tighten up your tone.

Compressors are really great for chicken pickin’ leads and articulated chords on clean but I also really liked how much character the MI Compressor added to my tone when I had the amp set to overdriven, basically what you are hearing is my Genz Benz Black Pearl 30 combo with the Volume and Boost up full, the EQ voicing set to natural, treble, middle and Bass set to 12 O’Clock and Top set to 1 O’clock. This setting creates a nice crunchy overdrive but it’s a bit flubby so the MI Compressor tightened it up nicely as if I had the master volume pushed up to half way rather than a quarter.

If you are looking for a Compressor that is transparent, versatile and includes features you don’t find on other Compressors like the Noise Gate and ability to run at 25v then check out the MI Effects Compressor. Head over to the MI Effects Dealers section to find out where you can go and give the pedal a test drive.

MI Effects website.

You can win this Electro-harmonix Big Muff Pi With Tone Wicker as part of the Blue Noize solo contest!

This is a first for me as I’m demoing 2 pedals at once, well ok one of them isn’t actually a pedal, maybe that should have been 2 products at once… there that’s better. So first up is the Electro-harmonix Big Muff Pi with Tone Wicker for some crazy retro fuzz action and the second is the Sanyo Pedal Juice which I mentioned a little while ago on Guitar Noize and it is a rechargeable 9v power supply.

The Sanyo Pedal Juice is a clever invention because not only do you reap the benefits of using your pedals without the potential hum and noise from a mains power supply but you can daisy chain both of your DC outputs meaning you can power multiple medals at once. First thing I had to do was charge the Pedal Juice, this literally means just plugging it in to the mains with the supplied power cord and leaving it until the little LED goes from Red to Orange to Green and finally goes off, that means you are 100% charged and ready to go (roughly 3 hours). Ok so once you have it charged it is very simple to use, just plug in the attached cords and plug them into your pedal and switch the pedal juice on. If you are using a single Ananlog effect you will get about 50 hours from a charge, if like me you have a mixture of digital and analog effects on your board that draw all up hundreds of milliamps(mA) then you might only squeeze a couple of hours out of it between charges, but that is still plenty of time if you are gigging!

The Big Muff Pi with Tone Wicker is basically a hot rodded version of the original Big Muff Pi, I incorrectly assumed in my demo above that to create the sound of the original you flick both the Tone and the Wicker switches off, apologies I’ve never used an original, in fact you need the Tone switch On. The Wicker switch opens up three high frequency filters to add more clarity and crispness to the distortion. Switching off the Tone completely bypasses the Tone circuit altogether so make sure you check your volume first because it gives the output a massive volume boost compared to with the Tone circuit on. I have tried to show as many tonal possibilities as I could in the demo above so I hope you enjoy my fuzzing riffs!

Electro-harmonix website
Sanyo Pedal Juice

The Goosoniqueworx Seventhheaven Distortion pedal is an incredibly versatile pedal as you will see and hear in the demo above, when I saw the words High Gain distortion on the Goosoniqueworx website I’m afraid I foolishly assumed that this would be a one trick pony but I was very wrong. There are lots of knobs and switches but don’t let that scare you off it is very simple, normally a distortion pedal has a tone knob, well the Seventhheaven has a 3 band EQ so 3 of those knobs are for treble, middle and bass just like on most amps, the controls apparently mimic high gain amp tone controls which are placed after the gain stages thus giving a post dirt tone stack. Either side are the usual Volume and Gain and there is one extra knob which flips between either Presence or Feedback using the toggle switch below it. The other toggle switch flicks between the low and high gain channels, I would love there to be an extra footswitch in the middle rather than this toggle switch as I think that both channels sound awesome and it would be just switching channels on an amp. Finally there are 2 footswitches, one is the True Bypass footswitch, the other is the Boost, this is an in-line boost pushes the pedal even harder creating the perfect metal crunch.

I found that I could easily dial in everything from Dual Rectifier, to modern and vintage Marshall sounds and then in low gain wonderful rounded overdrive reminiscent of a cranked Fender Twin and so easily too. I kept forgetting to change the settings because I’d tweak, find a great distortion tone and play for about half an hour then realise I was supposed to be testing all the different sounds possible, very addictive and much fun!

On my pedalboard I have a high gain and a low gain distortion for different sounds, this pedal does both and if it was footswitchable it would save bending down in between songs. Despite that small gripe I can’t fault this pedal’s sounds it has everything you could possibly ever want in a double-sized solid housing which runs on either 9v or 18v DC (not batteries) and is super quiet unlike some high gain pedals which can produce a lot of hiss.

Check out the Goosoniqueworx website for more info on this very cool pedal.

The POG2 from Electro-harmonix is the second generation of the popular Polyphonic Octave Generator capable of adding -2,-1,+1 & +2 Octaves to your signal simultaneously as well as removing the dry signal from the mix. New to version 2 is an attack control for volume swells on your effect, the 2-pole resonant low-pass filter now includes two additional Q modes and the newly enhanced detune control can add yet another dimension to your sound. I have tried to cover everything in my demo above but I have only demonstrated the pedal in its most basic form, prepare to spend countless hours tweaking sliders and saving sounds into 1 of the 8 presets I had to restrain myself otherwise I would probably have stayed up all night when it arrived. The only downside I can find is that if I was recording an album it would be on every track, which lets be honest might be a little over the top… well it would be the way I would use it.

I didn’t do the popular 12 string effect easily achievable with this pedal in my demo but it is just a matter of adjusting the +1 & +2 octaves until you get the desired effect. By the way one of the cool uses of the detune slider is that you can actually just add this and no other sliders to your dry signal to get a cool vintage chorus style effect!

Quick Specs:
True bypass
Totally programmable 8-preset memory with instant recall
5 mixable polyphonic octave harmonics
Attack delay slider controls the fade-in speed of the octaves
Low Pass filter with selectable Q
Dry signal can be routed through the Attack, LP, and Detune faders
Flawless polyphonic glitch-free tracking
Can be daisy chained with other pedals and power supplies
9DC-200 power supply included

Check out http://www.ehx.com for more info

Not only can you check out Dweezil Zappa playing his new Custom PRS Guitar in this video but you can also check out his latest sound creation with the Fractal Audio Axe-FX, a Cello patch, very cool.