Pigtronix were started in 1994 in California with the intention of 'designing and producing, boutique quality, technologically advanced analog effects pedals' and that is most certainly what they do! Rather than trying to emulate the past the Pigtronix team concentrate on producing effects that have a wide range of sounds and great flexibility. All the pedals combine several functions in one box. These are great pedals for experimentation and are equally suited to using on bass or keyboards. This is the kind of thing you need hanging around in the studio to give you a new sound and some inspiration!
UK delivery - £2.50
OFO DISNORTION £179
Three effects in one - Octave, Fuzz and Overdrive which can all be switched on together for serious sonic mayhem! The Octava circuit is fairly clean (fuzz can be added afterwards) and gives a variety of classic sounds from clean high octaves to 'ring modulatorish' wierdness. The Octava is in series before the Fuzz and Overdrive which are wired in parallel. The Fuzz section has level and gain controls as well as a preset tone filter - the shape control. This gives you 6 options: Full range, FAT, Smooth, Treble, Mid Scoop and Bass (handily written on the side of the unit for reference - although your ears should be able to tell!). These do pretty much what you would expect and are all really useable - just choose your favourite. The fuzz is smooth and harmonically rich even on the Treble setting. The overdrive is a great touch responsive circuit that just sounds good - the tone control doesn't have a great range - but it doesn't need it here.
EP-1 ENVELOPE PHASER £219
First and foremost this is a great Phaser even before we get into the possibilities offered by the Envelope follower or side chain input. The phaser section has 4 controls: Speed and Character control the rate and wave shape of the LFO, while the Intensity is the Wet/Dry mix and the Resonance controls the feedback. What this all adds up to is a lot of control over the sound - any kind of phase shifted sound is possible. Throughout the range these are warm, fat analogue sounds even when things start to get to the weird end of the range and they all have an expressive vocal quality. The phase shifting can be switched between additive and subtractive phasing - which can best be summed up as additive being harder and a little brighter and subtractive a slightly darker softer tone. The LED changes from red to green to indicate which is selected.
All in all, this really does do everything you could possibly want from a Phaser and probably more you hadn't thought of and would be equally at home on stage or in the studio. The quality of sounds and the range on offer more than justify it's price. This pedal only runs off the supplied 12V power supply.
PHi ECHOLUTION £479
The Echolution is a multi tap dual delay (switch between mod delay and tap tempo) with modulation (this description does no justice to what this unit can do). This is a quite a complicated beast but has a superb delay sound with up to 20 seconds of delay available! The basic delay has the standard blend and feedback controls but also a drive control to push the repeats into distortion and a hi-cut control to give a more analog feel and push the delay back into mix. There are 5 taps at predefined fractions of the delay time and any of these can be combined to give different rhythmic effects (the orange switches) plus the Phi switch for the magic Golden ratio taps! The blue switches offer looping, trail carryover and reverse options. The looping can be further modified by the taps as well as the modulation. The trail carryover means that the echoes can be set to continue after the effect is switched out - hopefully reverse is self explanatory. The modulation side can do both chorus and tremolo effects on the delay. With very short delay times you can get a very lush stereo chorus and a very useable tremolo effect. However this is where the fun starts - fiddle with the lfo speed, combinations of tremolo and chorus and you can get some seriously weird and wonderful effects - clanger impersonations and ray gun effects just two I came across on testing this! Then of course you can throw in the taps and the reverse option - stick the delay time on an expression pedal and all hell breaks loose - you can lose days playing with this if you enjoy sound mangling. This is so much more than a delay.
The unit is mono in but stereo out and has the option of two external footswitches (reverse and loop) and an expression pedal for the delay time. Don't be put off by the price - this pedal offers a huge amount of options and does things nothing else on the market can - if you are serious about your delay then you need one of these. This would make a great studio tool for processing just about anything.
ASDR ATTACK SUSTAIN £259
Details to come
Details to come
POLYSATURATOR £129
This is not a distortion pedal that is ever going to be described as 'sweet'! Definitely an aggressive sound with a huge array of tonal options verging more towards the fuzz than the saturated distortion the name might imply. The EQ here is active with 12db/octave giving massive boost or cut at 180Hz, 420Hz and 1kHz (Lo, Mid and Hi). This means this pedal can take a bit of fiddling with although the suggested settings in the manual are a really good place to start from. This pedal has a lot of low end available giving a real growl if you need it. This is an old school pedal offering more vintage tones than modern but the sheer variety on offer make this well worth checking out. A word of warning this pedal needs a power supply (15V supplied) but will also run of other supplies, including 9V.
Analog Mono Guitar synth!
Details to come
Check out the Pigtronix Website
The full range of Pigtronix effects are available from Jam Guitars.