Reviewing my Fat Sandwich

[zorrow]

When Dave came to Montreal I was carrying a Fat Sandwich distortion unit I had just got from mudshark.

It's time to review it:

First of all, mudshark is a very nice guy and it was a pleasure to deal with him.

Now, about the Fat Sandwich: it's a very versatile distortion pedal, offering a wide palette of possibilities --five external controls (volume, tone, distortion, presence & resonance) and three internal (curve, highs and drive). Its strength is also its weakness, as it's so adjustable that you have to struggle quite hard to find your own voice with it.

However, once you tweak it to your specific amp and guitar, this pedal can be true a tone monster. I finally managed to produce a deep, edgy, ""full" distorted tone when riffing, while still retaining a lot of attack, "openness" and "vocal-like qualities" in my leads. I'm very happy with the sounds I'm getting out from it at this point.

On the negative side, the Fat Sandwich is also quite noisy... or rather hard to "tame". I think it has to do with my Pignose preamp, which is very "over-excitable" . The documentation explicitly states that it's to be used with a clean amp, and we all now a Pignose, it is not. Setting both the preamp and the pedal volume knobs to 9 o'clock finally did the trick for me.

To conclude, if you want to experiment with distortion and have some spare time, a Fat Sandwich can work marvels for you, but lazy and/or over-busy guys should avoid it --but I didn't after all, so why should you?