From toad to ten

FYI- Toad Works pedals are now...

... TEN pedals.

Remembering my ex (Part 7)

I used to own this pedal- Toad Works Mr. Ed, it's pretty much in line with BOSS' DS-1 as far as distortion intensity is concerned, save for some crunchy extensions. Mr. Ed here refers to a certain Dutchman who's rather fabled for his 'Brown Sound' tone but coming from the pedal here, it's a little lacking. So it became a drive booster for my needs but didn't do good in terms of transparency. On hindsight, that's asking too much knowing this pedal was intended to re-create a certain tone, it's not meant to be transparent to begin with.

Distortion R Us...

These are all the distortion units I own bearing the 'Distortion' tag on them. They aren't excessively intense, just enough to out-drive an overdrive but nothing excessive to be worthy of a metal-type assault:

• Visual Sound: Son of Hyde
• BOSS: DS-1
• ARTEC: Soloist Distortion
• MXR: Distortion +
• Toadworks: Mr. Ed
• Seymour Duncan: Power Grid

PS: Elmo is not a distortion unit...

The little menace 3

So it's another test for the X-mini Capsule Speaker- can it replace a guitar amplifier?

If you refer to my test set-up here, the X-mini was attached to the output access of the Beta Aivin HM-200 & (to no surprise) it works. However, without a real amplifier acoustics together with the absence of speaker resonance/ overall presence, the X-mini sounds totally mono & rusty. there was also the menacing hum which would be eliminated with a noise reduction pedal no doubt. This is the very reaosn why its attachment to a processing device with amp simulation features yielded better tone- very much better in fact.

PS: The other pedal acting as a booster here is my Toadworks' Mr. Ed.