Subdecay Noise Box + Vintage Technology Toad Max

I'm loving a couple boutique guitar effects pedals I picked up last week.

The Subdecay Noise Box is really cool. At times it sounds like a ring mod, sometimes a fuzz pedal and other times a guitar synth, but it's none of those. It's an envelope sensitive harmonic frequency generator.

You can get some pretty crazy synthy sounds out of it by adjusting the freq, sense and chaos knobs. Turning the chaos knob to the left controls the attack. Turning it up to the right makes it lose its ability to track, and it spews out all kind of nasty randomness. The pedal is true-bypass, and when the noise gate kicks in at the end of a sustained note, it sounds like the signal is being ripped apart. Awesome.

Roger at Big City Music plugged me into the Noise Box, and I had to have it. It's kind of like the old Boss SYB bass synth pedals but better. Plus I'm a sucker for anything with word "noise" in it. The pedal works well on bass, guitar and drum machines.

The other pedal is the Toad Max from Vintage Technology. This pedal is Grunge. (Yes, with a capital G.)

The original Toad pedal had 2 knobs for level and gain. The Toad Max does away with the knobs and functions as if both were cranked up to 10 when you step on the one and only "Lick Me" switch. Major Grunge from single coils.

I met Tracy Sands, the man behind Vintage Technology, at Sam Ash Music in Hollywood. You may know Tracy from his work as Bad Cat Amplifier's head amp tech. His pedal designs are solid. If you haven't checked out his BFD tremolo, it's pretty sweet, too.