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King Loudness « A KILLER drive pedal from Zoom! »
Published on 04/18/11 at 10:07The Zoom Hyper Lead HL01 is one of the four pedals in Zoom's vastly unknown and underrated line of analog dirt boxes. This one was designed to be like a hard rock distortion, replicating the sound of a classic British stack amp. It has a very basic control set of gain, volume, treble, bass, middle, and range controls. The range control is very cool in that it adjusts the frequency and sweep of your midrange control, so you can adjust it to be more scooped in nature or more boosted in nature. As I said above, it is an analog pedal, so it does sound far more authentic than its digital counterparts. Being that Zoom is a company known for digital products, I was extremely skeptical that this pedal could work... but it does, and it does very well. I liked it so much that I sought out a PD01 Power Drive to run with it in tandem a few years later.
UTILIZATION
Setting up this pedal can be a little bit tough at first just because the controls need to be dialed in to counteract with one another, but once this happens it's a walk in the park. Most of the controls are fairly straightforward. The biggest one to dial in is the aforementioned "range" control. It really depends on the tone you are after. I find setting it at full gives the most "scooped" sounding tone, and moving it back towards 0 brings more midrange into the equation. I usually went for a fairly neutral tone (IE: setting it around 12 oclock or close to it) and it worked out quite well.
SOUND QUALITY
I used it most often with various Yamaha guitars and Yamaha and Laney amplifiers. One of the best hard rock tones I've had was my '92 Yamaha Pacifica with Gibson HBs into the Laney LC15R combo amp with the HL01 set up for a good seventies/eighties rock tone. I would set the Laney up for very mild overdrive (basically a clean tone with some grit when I picked harder) and use the HL01 for all my distorted tones. I used it in various rock, jazz, and blues projects without issue. The great thing about this pedal is that it's quite organic (due to the analog circuitry), and because of this it has a very tubelike tone and feel. When I plugged this pedal in, regardless of the amp, I FELT like I was using a tube amp, and that's a huge plus in the field of dirt boxes to me.
OVERALL OPINION
All in all, I feel that this pedal is great, and vastly underrated. I like it a lot, not only for the tone, but for how it feels when I use it. It's very versatile and works well for whichever musical styles I throw at it. I haven't used it or my PD01 as much since getting into more high dollar amp heads but occasionally I press it back into service when I have a pick up gig or a show that requires me using an amp that isn't my own. I want to try the other pedals in the series at some point as well, as I can imagine that they all have the same versatility and tubelike feel as the HL01.
Definitely an awesome pedal, especially for the money... if you get the chance to buy or try one, do it for sure!
UTILIZATION
Setting up this pedal can be a little bit tough at first just because the controls need to be dialed in to counteract with one another, but once this happens it's a walk in the park. Most of the controls are fairly straightforward. The biggest one to dial in is the aforementioned "range" control. It really depends on the tone you are after. I find setting it at full gives the most "scooped" sounding tone, and moving it back towards 0 brings more midrange into the equation. I usually went for a fairly neutral tone (IE: setting it around 12 oclock or close to it) and it worked out quite well.
SOUND QUALITY
I used it most often with various Yamaha guitars and Yamaha and Laney amplifiers. One of the best hard rock tones I've had was my '92 Yamaha Pacifica with Gibson HBs into the Laney LC15R combo amp with the HL01 set up for a good seventies/eighties rock tone. I would set the Laney up for very mild overdrive (basically a clean tone with some grit when I picked harder) and use the HL01 for all my distorted tones. I used it in various rock, jazz, and blues projects without issue. The great thing about this pedal is that it's quite organic (due to the analog circuitry), and because of this it has a very tubelike tone and feel. When I plugged this pedal in, regardless of the amp, I FELT like I was using a tube amp, and that's a huge plus in the field of dirt boxes to me.
OVERALL OPINION
All in all, I feel that this pedal is great, and vastly underrated. I like it a lot, not only for the tone, but for how it feels when I use it. It's very versatile and works well for whichever musical styles I throw at it. I haven't used it or my PD01 as much since getting into more high dollar amp heads but occasionally I press it back into service when I have a pick up gig or a show that requires me using an amp that isn't my own. I want to try the other pedals in the series at some point as well, as I can imagine that they all have the same versatility and tubelike feel as the HL01.
Definitely an awesome pedal, especially for the money... if you get the chance to buy or try one, do it for sure!