When Erik from Inductor Guitars proposed me to review his MP-1 pedal, I was interested right away because it had already attracted my attention last year when Fuzz Box Girl released a video about it. But I'll have to do the review my own way because 1. my technical knowledge is quite limited, so I can just talk about what I hear and feel, and 2. most of the guitar sound description terminology is undecipherable to me, and I cannot really use any of the colorful adjectives you find in catalogues and magazines...
The astutely named Mellifluous Pussy MP-1 is Inductor Guitars's take on the Interfax Harmonic Percolator, a fuzz pedal from the 1970s. It just has 1 volume knob and 2 switches - that makes 4 positions. I tried it with my Rickenbacker 620 and an Eastwood Airline 3P, plugged in a Marshall stack.
The thing I noticed right away and highly enjoyed is that the MP-1 combines a super sharp bite with a warm sound, with quite present medium - that is probably what makes the harmonics sing. The sound is particularly rich with a single coil guitar, with humbuckers you can still go for a good fat sound with bigger low but it's less special. In its way it respects more the original sound of the pickups than many distortion pedals I use, not that it matters much to me but people who play instruments for their specific sound will be interested.
I also like the velcro-ish quality of the MP-1 - it's not going synth but it's in the edge, staying on the enjoyable side (I mean it stops before you feel your teeth are about to fall), so the sound is quite unique without having to be freakish to stand out of the lot. Since you don't have many controls, you have to like the sound how it is - still the pedal reacts quite well to the volume knob of a a guitar -, I mostly played the cleaner position, perfect for super chopping rhythm, something I have no equivalent of in my other pedals.
Here I made a rough demo of the most distorted position - with my Ricken straight to the computer (I didn't put too much effort in it since I don't believe that YouTube's sound through computers' speakers make justice to any kind of sound device unless you have a real sound engineer to do the post-production!)
The thing I noticed right away and highly enjoyed is that the MP-1 combines a super sharp bite with a warm sound, with quite present medium - that is probably what makes the harmonics sing. The sound is particularly rich with a single coil guitar, with humbuckers you can still go for a good fat sound with bigger low but it's less special. In its way it respects more the original sound of the pickups than many distortion pedals I use, not that it matters much to me but people who play instruments for their specific sound will be interested.
I also like the velcro-ish quality of the MP-1 - it's not going synth but it's in the edge, staying on the enjoyable side (I mean it stops before you feel your teeth are about to fall), so the sound is quite unique without having to be freakish to stand out of the lot. Since you don't have many controls, you have to like the sound how it is - still the pedal reacts quite well to the volume knob of a a guitar -, I mostly played the cleaner position, perfect for super chopping rhythm, something I have no equivalent of in my other pedals.
Here I made a rough demo of the most distorted position - with my Ricken straight to the computer (I didn't put too much effort in it since I don't believe that YouTube's sound through computers' speakers make justice to any kind of sound device unless you have a real sound engineer to do the post-production!)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment