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James... « It's alright »
Published on 02/25/12 at 17:56MXR Custom Badass '78 Distortion Pedal Features at a Glance:
Hot-rodded classic circuit gives you huge distortion tones
Roars with both amp stack tones and old-school pedal distortion
Delivers soaring leads and rich, saturated rhythms
CRUNCH button boosts harmonic content of distortion
UTILIZATION
I probably wouldn't have tried this box if my friend didn't insist I did. He was seriously nagging me about it actually. I'm really more of an overdrive guy who stays away from distortions in general but I figured what the heck. The layout is nothing out of the ordinary. Tone volume gain...got it? Also there's a crunch button or something that "boosts the harmonic content." Bleh. Okay.
I tested it with a Peavey Classic 30 and a Tom Anderson Drop Top. I didn't use any other effects. I just wanted to see how it sounded by itself.
Build quality is good. MXR designs are great. Sometimes they miss the mark in the sound department but I rarely have any issues with pedals being noisy or breaking.
SOUND QUALITY
At low levels of gain this is actually a fairly transparent distortion which surprised me. It's almost like a boost if you turn it low enough. The pedal starts to impart a voice of its own at higher settings. It's very tight. Think Aerosmith or old Ozzy stuff. Kind of has that razor sharp 80's upper mids thing going on. It will do the 70's stuff too. But overall this is a pretty raunchilly voiced pedal that lives up to the name. It can definitely take a clean amp and send it into the upper stratosphere.
The crunch button I find to be really useless. It makes the pedal sound worse overall, and adds to the already questionably versatile voicing. Sure it's great if you want to rock 80's style, but this pedal is basically a one or two trick pony.
OVERALL OPINION
I can say that it seems like another solid MXR pedal, but unless you are in a ZZ Top cover band, I can't see you using this pedal for much else. It's okay as a boost, and it does have a nice range of usable gain, but like I said the voicing limits what you can do with it. Would have been nice for MXR to include a voice knob. I feel like I'm being hard on it because I don't like what it does. But for the price I would like something more flexible. It's just not for me I guess.
Hot-rodded classic circuit gives you huge distortion tones
Roars with both amp stack tones and old-school pedal distortion
Delivers soaring leads and rich, saturated rhythms
CRUNCH button boosts harmonic content of distortion
UTILIZATION
I probably wouldn't have tried this box if my friend didn't insist I did. He was seriously nagging me about it actually. I'm really more of an overdrive guy who stays away from distortions in general but I figured what the heck. The layout is nothing out of the ordinary. Tone volume gain...got it? Also there's a crunch button or something that "boosts the harmonic content." Bleh. Okay.
I tested it with a Peavey Classic 30 and a Tom Anderson Drop Top. I didn't use any other effects. I just wanted to see how it sounded by itself.
Build quality is good. MXR designs are great. Sometimes they miss the mark in the sound department but I rarely have any issues with pedals being noisy or breaking.
SOUND QUALITY
At low levels of gain this is actually a fairly transparent distortion which surprised me. It's almost like a boost if you turn it low enough. The pedal starts to impart a voice of its own at higher settings. It's very tight. Think Aerosmith or old Ozzy stuff. Kind of has that razor sharp 80's upper mids thing going on. It will do the 70's stuff too. But overall this is a pretty raunchilly voiced pedal that lives up to the name. It can definitely take a clean amp and send it into the upper stratosphere.
The crunch button I find to be really useless. It makes the pedal sound worse overall, and adds to the already questionably versatile voicing. Sure it's great if you want to rock 80's style, but this pedal is basically a one or two trick pony.
OVERALL OPINION
I can say that it seems like another solid MXR pedal, but unless you are in a ZZ Top cover band, I can't see you using this pedal for much else. It's okay as a boost, and it does have a nice range of usable gain, but like I said the voicing limits what you can do with it. Would have been nice for MXR to include a voice knob. I feel like I'm being hard on it because I don't like what it does. But for the price I would like something more flexible. It's just not for me I guess.