Should I be concerned? At least a little worried? My stomp pedal board will never be the same after I dropped the Ogre Thunderclap Distortion pedal into its signal chain. It’s one of three new Ogre guitar stomp pedals that are packaged as disembodied heads of menacing and nightmarish demons sculpted in die-cast aluminum. They come in four anodized colors—gray, red, green and yellow and, when activated, all three pedals have glowing blue eyes (LEDs) to look up and “watch” you!
The Kronomaster Delay and Tubeholic Overdrive pedals are alien heads fitted with retractable frontal lobes that flip back to expose their essential controls. The Kronomaster digital delay has Time, Wet/Dry Mix and Feedback controls—you can get any delay sound from tight doubling to long musical slaps. Tubeholic has Level, Tone, and Gain controls and uses a NOS diode for symmetrical clipping but also works outstandingly for clean boost as well.
The Thunderclap Distortion pedal is an even scarier-looking creature whose four horns function as level, bass, treble and gain controls. I found it to have a wide gain range great for metal tones especially with high-gain amps—the Fender Blues Junior I used never sounded as nasty as it did with this pedal.
All three of the new Ogre pedals sell for $299.99 MSRP each.
Barry Rudolph is a recording engineer/mixer who has worked on over 30 gold and platinum records. He has recorded and/or mixed Lynyrd Skynyrd, Hall & Oates, Pat Benatar, Rod Stewart, the Corrs, and more. Barry has his own futuristic music mixing facility and loves teaching audio engineering at Musician’s Institute, Hollywood, CA. He is a lifetime Grammy-voting member of NARAS and a contributing editor for Mix Magazine. http://barryrudolph.com
