Thought I'd share my excitement of this new beast from ThorpyFX
Arrived first thing with the postie and I couldn't wait to tear open the box and have a go.
Here is a stock piccy as I have been too busy playing with it to take photos :)
Whilst I was mad keen to tear open the box, I did take a moment to appreciate how well it had been packed and how nice the presentation was .
The pedal itself was carefully wrapped in layers of protective polybag and tissue or crepe paper, the outer layer of which was a lovely shade of purple and sealed with a Thorpy FX tag.
It was not unlike when my girlfriend has bought an expensive dress or underwear and it all comes beautifully presented in a box.
So full marks for that.
First impressions when you open her up and get the unit in your hand is nice - it's solid as heck , but not stupidly heavy and it's more compact than you'd think from seeing pics of it on it's own.
I do like the enclosure and the jacks being at the top make it's footprint easier to deal with.
It kind of has two gain controls that do different /opposing things:
The main gain control does what you kind of expect imparting a nice tubescreamer-ish upper mid focussed tone.
However the Calibre control is what makes the pedal for me - turning this up makes the tone bigger and seems to add top and bottom and stops the other gain control from getting boxy or nasal - especially with humbuckers.
I think you would dial in more gain and less Calibre with a traditional strat or tele, whilst Humbuckers do benefit from being able to add more Calibre and regain the lows and top end - making it more amp like in tone - very impressive.
So ok - whats it like plugged in ?
Well as soon as plugged my humbucker equipped strat in I had a good sound and I hadn't even tweaked anything.
In use it turns out to be really simple - getting the mix of the Gain and Caliber controls is the secret to dialling in your sound - maybe aided and abetted by the tone control , which has a nice range .
All the tones are usable and it's just a question of finding the one you favour.
Plugged into a clean-ish Bassman channel on my amp I was in classic rock heaven - 70s Alice Cooper tones and the like just there at my fingertips. I think it will prove easy to tweak no matter which guitar I put into it.
I can also see that I could use another tube screamer type pedal in front of it to add a lead sound on top of that .
I now realise what people mean by stacking pedals.
Plugging it into a raunchy plexi channel - sort of Thin lizzy or AC/DC style gain levels and using it to tip over into a heavier sound or a lead sound seemed to work well as well.
If you turn both the gain and the Calibre right down whilst the pedal is active you pretty much go back to your bypassed tone - I find this interesting as you can effectively paint your own overdriven landscape by altering these two controls , dialling in more grit and crunch.
Apparently this is because Thorpy decided to make it be unity gain at zero rather than turning all the way off. Nice touch!
The pedal stays pretty amp-like in nature, which pleases me greatly as I like overdrive and don't like fuzz (although they can be great in their place).
The other thing that is stunning is how well the sound cleans up if you back off your volume control - it's like having a second channel or gain-stage on a good sounding amp that responds to what you do on the guitar. Allows for a lot of dynamics. NICE!
Meanwhile here is a picture for size comparison against some of the popular size pedals
