lovepedal, karl, and really dynamic fuzzes

So I open my mail box and a small box tumbles out and hits the concrete. Thunk.

"Oh," I think. "It's a pedal. I hope it didn't break."

I pick it up. It's the Karl I ordered on sale from the Lovepedal site. Plug it in, grab my strat, hit a chord, and ROAWRR, it sounds like my freakin' amp is about to self destruct. Wowsers.

I crank down the thing and play an arpeggio. The first half is inaudible, the second half is unbelievably super digital and intense. My strat is dying. Everything is in agony. I'm like, "Holy f**k, I did break it!"

I two strings, gentle but not super-gentle. I get a digital squawk and then the weirdest, most unexpected fwub-fwub-fwub, some sort of bizarre unbalanced trem. I hit the strings again. Fwub FWUB fwub fwub FWUB fwub. It reminds me of when a helicopter gets hit in the movies, and it starts to lazily spin out of control.

Four minutes later, I've figured out that it's not broken, but that there's a very distinct cut-off point. Volume going in below which gets put into that very distinct fwub-fwub-fwub down-spiral. It's totally controllable. I'm starting to control it. I feel like a god.

Four hours later, I'm starting to get the hang of it. I e-mail Sean at lovepedal to tell him this is one of the best things ever.

Two days later, I'm ready to sell it, because I think I'm just not good enough to control it. I despair.

Two days after that, it's my favorite pedal. WOooah.

So, yeah, Karl. Woah. It's an incredible pedal. Fuzz. Intense fuzz. FUZZ. There's definitely a learning curve. But once I got through it, woooah. Elemental transistorized fury at my fingertips. SCRAWWWWCK. Shroooom. Yeah.

It's a very sensitive, very dynamic pedal. Sometimes, "dynamic" gets shoved in with "amp-like". This is not amp-like. It responds nothing, nothing, nothing like an amp. It's as sensitive and dynamic to pick attack and all that good stuff as nicely cranked amp, but with a totally different response pattern. It's like, where an amp-like distortion pedal is getting your repressed lover drunk for the first time, the Karl is like importing a new lover. From Russia. With her own leather collection. And she wants to hurt you.

I love Karl.

Karl-Strat is definitely a very different instrument from Strat. Not Strat-plus, or strat-modded. Different beast. Angrier one. Yeah.

The best I can describe it is: sometimes in the movies, when a robot is dying, it gets this transistery screaming thing. Imagine that channeled. The Karl makes my flutey, vocal strat more flutey. But dying-robot flutey. Hard to describe. Very, very musical.

Anyway, I've got a question. What was it? Right. Dynamics. This is an incredibly dynamic pedal. My question was: what other fuzzboxes are this dynamic? Mediocre fuzzboxes just add a fuzz over everything, the good ones do respond to pick attack, but nothing I've played is like *this*, this sensitive. My other fuzz-box is a fulltone '69, which is excellent for crunching things up a little, but it doesn't weep and moan and scream with my guitar like Karl does.

Anyway, yeah. I need another fuzzbox this dynamic but at a less insane level, for those situations in which Karl's madness is not welcome, something in between the '69 and Karl. Something that can explode with crunch when I bear down hard. What is there? The clips for Lovepedal Balance clips on The Gainsters cache sound like this, but it's currently unavailable (and pricey!). McFuzz Hot? Hellbilly? How's the dynamics? Though if nothing else will do, I can save bucks and wait.

Oh, that fwub-fwub-fwub thing is part of your initial specs, isn't it cuz/karl? I remember reading it somewhere. What IS that thing? How does it work? I love it.

-thi

 

Yup - that's about where I keep it. A third on the intensity and a little above unity volume.

It's a little hard to find unity, actually. It's a loud unit.

-thi

 

And thanks Scott. Me was inspired by the pedal.

-thi

 

Yeah, I've tried the Fuzz Factory a bunch of times. I would consider Fuzz Factory "total wackiness" where Karl is "extreme fuzz action". If I were mostly about studio recording, the FF would be all there, but can't imagine tweaking it live. Karl has a smaller range of just totally odd noises, but a majority of them are available at any given point on the dial, with picking technique and such.

What FF needs is a digital memory for its settings, like a graphic EQ.

-thi

 

I'm sleepy again today because I stayed up until 4 AM again playing with Karl.

-thi