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Way Huge Swollen Pickle MKII review on Bass
I can't comment too much about this one for guitar since I've spent most of my time dialing it in for bass, but I can play with it more for guitar if people want me to talk about that too.
This pedal is difficult to talk about for a number of reasons that many people that are familiar with the pedal already know. For the people that don't know, however, here they are.
1. You must be absurdly patient with this pedal when dialing it in.
2. Its tone can and will dramatically chage depending on your gear. Changing guitars, not so much, changing AMPS as well as guitars and the thing will potentially need to be almost completely redialed.
3. Dialing in this pedal involves removing the back plate to adjust 2 very critical internal controls that control the texture of the fuzz and the midrange content in tandem with the 2 knobs on the front of the pedal as well with the typical "volume, tone, gain" set up.
4. Every single control knob effects how the others behave. As in you can have booming low end scooped mid tone one second and tin-can like "over the telephone" buzz just by turning one of the knobs.
These can be blessings and curses. On one hand, the range to dial in the fuzz with is absolutely incredible. On the otherhand, finding the specific tone that you have in your head with this thing is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. One one hand you may never need to buy a fuzz pedal again, on the other you might not be able to find the sound you are looking for in it and lose patience with it or give up on it totally. If you're a fuzz enthusiast and love all kinds of fuzz tones while looking for new ones, it's a gold mine. If you are rather picky about your fuzz tone, it might be better to just buy the pedal that does it right away rather than buying this one to fiddle with it and still come up with not exactly what you want for one reason or another.
No ****, I almost returned the thing twice. I remembered trying it for the first time and loving how wild it was. It has a default sound that is more "unstable" and boomy than other fuzzes. After being recommended to it here, I headed down to Guitar Center to playing with it again. I ended up snagging a used one in great shape, though I notice they yellow a bit with age, go figure.
I was in my room at night playing with my Swollen Pickle hoping nobody would hear me. I THOUGHT I found a good tone for it after about a half hour, but then I brought it to practice with the 3 piece metal band and it sucked me right out of the audible range. The low end was there but it decimated my attack. This was after I turned the midrange voicing control on the inside all the way UP too. I tweaked it, but the only way I could get it audible was to make the fuzz REALLY harsh and farty. I couldn't get the smooth fuzz I wanted to still sit well.
I almost gave up here, but then I tried it in a different amp. Thank God I did, it was great. So with some faith restored in it, I cracked it open again and tried to match the fuzz tone I got out of THAT amp, just using my own.
Bingo
Everything locked in, and instead of being swallowed by the band, it helped it sound huge, and didn't interfere with the guitar's territory either. Like it was IDEAL. It was the tone I was looking for when I got the thing. Huge low end that sits well, a smooth and non farty fuzz that won't sound like a destroyed speaker. Turns out, that I actually needed to lower the gain quite a bit and flex the voicing of the midrange more so it wasn't clashing with the guitar.
If you see some videos or listen to some clips of this thing, you'll notice it is different from other fuzzes in that it can get kind of sputtery with the attack. Think like "Hey Hey My My (Into the Black)" levels of fuzz. The output of your guitar or bass will influence where your sustain control is a LOT. This sputtery nastiness is awesome for certain moments, but is not an "all the time" kind of fuzz sound for most people. For bass it's especially weird cause it kind of diminishes your attack and everything sort of sounds like it's blowing up.
I'm telling you right now, this kind of sputter WILL be present with the pedal running all the knobs at noon. This is a HIGH GAIN crazy fuzz. The smoother fuzz tone that you are probably looking for is probably between 10 and 7 oclock on the sustain knob, WAY low on the thing. Volume is always relative, but as I mentioned, everything on this pedal controls everything else to some extent. I tried other recommended settings and they just WOULD NOT work with my set up.
My settings ended up being
Loudness noon
Sustain 9 oclock
Filter noon
Scoop 3 oclock
Crunch 9 oclock
Internal
Clip 7 oclock/all the way left
Voice 9 oclock
But that won't be very helpful to someone that isn't playing through my rig.
What I am instead going to do is write a process that I used to find what I was looking for, so anyone that is trying to find their own sound can have a good way of navigating the pedal. Yes it is only 5 knobs but as I said, each heavily effects the other, and getting them right is a balancing act. So here's what I did.
Start with the filter, scoop, and crunch controls at noon with your sustain ALL THE WAY off. Have your volume anywhere you want for now, it just needs to be audible.
Then have your internal controls accessible. The factory setting is all the way to the left for both. I like my clip knob all the way to the left where it is at already because it is a smooth "muff style". Turning it to the right will get you more of a splatty kind of "open" fuzz.
Start by tweaking this until you find the texture of the fuzz you want, or at least where it feels the "most right" to you. I've noticed there are weird between areas with this knob that can make the pedal sound really unique or really distant. I liked it best at either one side or the other completely but you could be different. This is just meant to get the closest you can to the texture of the fuzz you want, it's ok to compromise for now.
Next move on the the voice knob and set your midrange voicing. Pick a good area where you can see yourself cutting or boosting from it. Think of these as the major voice of the pedal and the 2 mini controls on the front as fine tuners. Setting these up where you want them will give you the maximum usable range for the outside of the pedal, so we are working in the order of priority right now.
After you have you midrange voice, go back to the clip knob and play with it a bit, it may not need much if any adjusting. Just make sure the fuzz texture wasn't changed too much by turning the voice knob, and if it was, now is the time to readjust it so it sounds right.
Now move on to the 2 trim pots on the front, but keep the back off the pedal, you might need to adjust those internal controls again. Play with the crunch knob first. Turning it left with give you a smoother and compressed fuzz. If you want a "high gain" sounding fizzier fuzz, then turning it to the left will effect your sustain knob in that way. Turning it right will make it more open and less compressed, it will also make it much LOUDER.
This is where you start using the ridiculous range of the loudness knob to help you out. As you go further left or right with the crunch knob, use the loudness knob to compensate for volume lost or gained when turning it.
Now move over to the scoop control. Again, keep the loudness knob in check because this will dramatically change the volume too. Turning it up will help you cut and has a volume boost, rolling back will thin out your tone but add low end to help you sit better. You might think you're doing something wrong by turning the knobs in a way that you hear a substantial volume drop but you're not, just bring the volume up to match. I'm pretty sure the volume knob was created with this range deliberately so that this can be done. With the crunch and scoop knobs all the way up, you're not going to have your volume up very high at all. If you keep the crunch and scoop knobs pretty far back then you're going to have your volume up at a more reasonable level typical to other pedals, like at noon or higher.
Carefully start bringing up your sustain knob. Keep going until your low strings lose definition and start to sputter. Mine is around 10 or 11 oclock through my gear and with the way I have my pedal dialed in, but yours will likely be different. Whether you want that sputtering or not, it is good to know where that starts so you can either avoid it or utilize it. If you DON'T want the sputter, then consider your range for distortion from completely off up to that point. You will find that it is PLENTY of gain. Any higher and the clipping starts tripping over itself, so for the more traditional fuzz tones, you don't need much, and all the way off is still a pretty subtle fuzz. If you want even less than that then you probably were not looking for a high gain silicon fuzz to begin with, but adjusting the internal controls can get you decently far into vintage fuzz territory. I've seen people do octave up and fuzz face style tones with this thing in addition to the infamous Neil Young "Black" fuzz, so chances are it has you covered.
Now is the time when you can double check everything. Give the internal controls another quick tweak and make sure they are where you want them. This is also a good time to check how the clip/crunch and voice/scoop knobs respond to each other. After that, you can feel free to screw it shut again.
So now that you have the VOICE of the pedal pretty much dialed in, play with it in a band setting. This will tell you where you need to go from here. There should be no need to adjust the internal controls anymore. If you want to cut more then you can try to turn the scoop and or clip up. These still effect the overall voice of the pedal pretty heavily, so decide what is priority for you. If you like the midrange where it is at and want to change the texture to give it more bite, then turn the crunch knob. If you like the fuzz texture but just want to bring it out more, then turn up the scoop knob. Keep control of the loudness knob and have the sustain where you want it. You can still easily get lost or overpower everyone with how these controls are set. If tweaking the controls causes the sputtering to come back then lower the sustain until it tightens up and adjust the loudness to compensate for your changes again.
Then finally you tweak the filter control. It's not like a typical tone control that rolls off highs. This thing will ADD bass when you roll it off and suck away your highs. Turn it up and your low end starts to disappear while the grit becomes louder and more prevalent. I like mine right in the middle for my settings.
And that should just about do it. Doing everything in that order finally got it where I wanted it. It's at this point that you can ignore the mini and internal controls because now you have the core voice of the pedal set for the most part, and the big knobs on the front will help you play around in that area that is usable for you, but remember that you can still fine tune the core sound of the pedal with the 2 knobs in front in case you switch amps or other kinds of gear. From one guitar to the next, it's not that different. Like weaker pickups will let you bring sustain up a bit higher without sputtering and maybe your filter knob may need to be tweaked but that's it, just like any other 3 knob dirt pedal.
I haven't tried it with enough amps to comment, but I'm pretty confident that a little tweaking of the scoop and crunch controls can set you where you want to be at. Once you get that main voice you're looking for down, it should be smooth sailing. Right now, the pedal sounds good with the 4 amps I've tried it with from tube to solid state with minimal tweaking.
So yeah I hope that helps.
I mean there is also no shortage of people that can't find a sound they don't like out of the thing too, and I can't blame them at all. This pedal is remarkably good as coping the tones of other fuzz pedals while having a pretty identifiable default voice of its own. I mean I can get this thing to sound like a muff or a fuzz face or a destroyed speaker if I want it to now. Can't say the same about the other way around however.
So for me, it was kind of a pain at first, but if you stick with it, I can almost guarantee it will do what you want it to do within the realm of fuzz possibilities (short of having a blend control, but with the amount of low end that the thing can actually add rather than just retain, it isn't much of a problem). I even got close to setting it in so that I could almost clean it up with the volume control. I might have even been able to completely if I set the internal controls a certain way, and with a pedal that is marketed as a high gain silicon fuzz, that is pretty impressive. It can even get into the realms of overdrive and distortion tones.
Out of 5?
Versatility 5
Sound 4.5
Ease of use 2
Value 4
I'm keeping it on my board. It loves my wah pedal, and is really smooth and tight now that I have it dialed in. It'll be whatever fuzz you want it to be with enough love and effort put in. I wish it came with a better set of directions than just the postcard style manual though. Damn I wrote a lot. Probably shouldn't have had that last Redbull.
This pedal is difficult to talk about for a number of reasons that many people that are familiar with the pedal already know. For the people that don't know, however, here they are.
1. You must be absurdly patient with this pedal when dialing it in.
2. Its tone can and will dramatically chage depending on your gear. Changing guitars, not so much, changing AMPS as well as guitars and the thing will potentially need to be almost completely redialed.
3. Dialing in this pedal involves removing the back plate to adjust 2 very critical internal controls that control the texture of the fuzz and the midrange content in tandem with the 2 knobs on the front of the pedal as well with the typical "volume, tone, gain" set up.
4. Every single control knob effects how the others behave. As in you can have booming low end scooped mid tone one second and tin-can like "over the telephone" buzz just by turning one of the knobs.
These can be blessings and curses. On one hand, the range to dial in the fuzz with is absolutely incredible. On the otherhand, finding the specific tone that you have in your head with this thing is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. One one hand you may never need to buy a fuzz pedal again, on the other you might not be able to find the sound you are looking for in it and lose patience with it or give up on it totally. If you're a fuzz enthusiast and love all kinds of fuzz tones while looking for new ones, it's a gold mine. If you are rather picky about your fuzz tone, it might be better to just buy the pedal that does it right away rather than buying this one to fiddle with it and still come up with not exactly what you want for one reason or another.
No ****, I almost returned the thing twice. I remembered trying it for the first time and loving how wild it was. It has a default sound that is more "unstable" and boomy than other fuzzes. After being recommended to it here, I headed down to Guitar Center to playing with it again. I ended up snagging a used one in great shape, though I notice they yellow a bit with age, go figure.
I was in my room at night playing with my Swollen Pickle hoping nobody would hear me. I THOUGHT I found a good tone for it after about a half hour, but then I brought it to practice with the 3 piece metal band and it sucked me right out of the audible range. The low end was there but it decimated my attack. This was after I turned the midrange voicing control on the inside all the way UP too. I tweaked it, but the only way I could get it audible was to make the fuzz REALLY harsh and farty. I couldn't get the smooth fuzz I wanted to still sit well.
I almost gave up here, but then I tried it in a different amp. Thank God I did, it was great. So with some faith restored in it, I cracked it open again and tried to match the fuzz tone I got out of THAT amp, just using my own.
Bingo
Everything locked in, and instead of being swallowed by the band, it helped it sound huge, and didn't interfere with the guitar's territory either. Like it was IDEAL. It was the tone I was looking for when I got the thing. Huge low end that sits well, a smooth and non farty fuzz that won't sound like a destroyed speaker. Turns out, that I actually needed to lower the gain quite a bit and flex the voicing of the midrange more so it wasn't clashing with the guitar.
If you see some videos or listen to some clips of this thing, you'll notice it is different from other fuzzes in that it can get kind of sputtery with the attack. Think like "Hey Hey My My (Into the Black)" levels of fuzz. The output of your guitar or bass will influence where your sustain control is a LOT. This sputtery nastiness is awesome for certain moments, but is not an "all the time" kind of fuzz sound for most people. For bass it's especially weird cause it kind of diminishes your attack and everything sort of sounds like it's blowing up.
I'm telling you right now, this kind of sputter WILL be present with the pedal running all the knobs at noon. This is a HIGH GAIN crazy fuzz. The smoother fuzz tone that you are probably looking for is probably between 10 and 7 oclock on the sustain knob, WAY low on the thing. Volume is always relative, but as I mentioned, everything on this pedal controls everything else to some extent. I tried other recommended settings and they just WOULD NOT work with my set up.
My settings ended up being
Loudness noon
Sustain 9 oclock
Filter noon
Scoop 3 oclock
Crunch 9 oclock
Internal
Clip 7 oclock/all the way left
Voice 9 oclock
But that won't be very helpful to someone that isn't playing through my rig.
What I am instead going to do is write a process that I used to find what I was looking for, so anyone that is trying to find their own sound can have a good way of navigating the pedal. Yes it is only 5 knobs but as I said, each heavily effects the other, and getting them right is a balancing act. So here's what I did.
Start with the filter, scoop, and crunch controls at noon with your sustain ALL THE WAY off. Have your volume anywhere you want for now, it just needs to be audible.
Then have your internal controls accessible. The factory setting is all the way to the left for both. I like my clip knob all the way to the left where it is at already because it is a smooth "muff style". Turning it to the right will get you more of a splatty kind of "open" fuzz.
Start by tweaking this until you find the texture of the fuzz you want, or at least where it feels the "most right" to you. I've noticed there are weird between areas with this knob that can make the pedal sound really unique or really distant. I liked it best at either one side or the other completely but you could be different. This is just meant to get the closest you can to the texture of the fuzz you want, it's ok to compromise for now.
Next move on the the voice knob and set your midrange voicing. Pick a good area where you can see yourself cutting or boosting from it. Think of these as the major voice of the pedal and the 2 mini controls on the front as fine tuners. Setting these up where you want them will give you the maximum usable range for the outside of the pedal, so we are working in the order of priority right now.
After you have you midrange voice, go back to the clip knob and play with it a bit, it may not need much if any adjusting. Just make sure the fuzz texture wasn't changed too much by turning the voice knob, and if it was, now is the time to readjust it so it sounds right.
Now move on to the 2 trim pots on the front, but keep the back off the pedal, you might need to adjust those internal controls again. Play with the crunch knob first. Turning it left with give you a smoother and compressed fuzz. If you want a "high gain" sounding fizzier fuzz, then turning it to the left will effect your sustain knob in that way. Turning it right will make it more open and less compressed, it will also make it much LOUDER.
This is where you start using the ridiculous range of the loudness knob to help you out. As you go further left or right with the crunch knob, use the loudness knob to compensate for volume lost or gained when turning it.
Now move over to the scoop control. Again, keep the loudness knob in check because this will dramatically change the volume too. Turning it up will help you cut and has a volume boost, rolling back will thin out your tone but add low end to help you sit better. You might think you're doing something wrong by turning the knobs in a way that you hear a substantial volume drop but you're not, just bring the volume up to match. I'm pretty sure the volume knob was created with this range deliberately so that this can be done. With the crunch and scoop knobs all the way up, you're not going to have your volume up very high at all. If you keep the crunch and scoop knobs pretty far back then you're going to have your volume up at a more reasonable level typical to other pedals, like at noon or higher.
Carefully start bringing up your sustain knob. Keep going until your low strings lose definition and start to sputter. Mine is around 10 or 11 oclock through my gear and with the way I have my pedal dialed in, but yours will likely be different. Whether you want that sputtering or not, it is good to know where that starts so you can either avoid it or utilize it. If you DON'T want the sputter, then consider your range for distortion from completely off up to that point. You will find that it is PLENTY of gain. Any higher and the clipping starts tripping over itself, so for the more traditional fuzz tones, you don't need much, and all the way off is still a pretty subtle fuzz. If you want even less than that then you probably were not looking for a high gain silicon fuzz to begin with, but adjusting the internal controls can get you decently far into vintage fuzz territory. I've seen people do octave up and fuzz face style tones with this thing in addition to the infamous Neil Young "Black" fuzz, so chances are it has you covered.
Now is the time when you can double check everything. Give the internal controls another quick tweak and make sure they are where you want them. This is also a good time to check how the clip/crunch and voice/scoop knobs respond to each other. After that, you can feel free to screw it shut again.
So now that you have the VOICE of the pedal pretty much dialed in, play with it in a band setting. This will tell you where you need to go from here. There should be no need to adjust the internal controls anymore. If you want to cut more then you can try to turn the scoop and or clip up. These still effect the overall voice of the pedal pretty heavily, so decide what is priority for you. If you like the midrange where it is at and want to change the texture to give it more bite, then turn the crunch knob. If you like the fuzz texture but just want to bring it out more, then turn up the scoop knob. Keep control of the loudness knob and have the sustain where you want it. You can still easily get lost or overpower everyone with how these controls are set. If tweaking the controls causes the sputtering to come back then lower the sustain until it tightens up and adjust the loudness to compensate for your changes again.
Then finally you tweak the filter control. It's not like a typical tone control that rolls off highs. This thing will ADD bass when you roll it off and suck away your highs. Turn it up and your low end starts to disappear while the grit becomes louder and more prevalent. I like mine right in the middle for my settings.
And that should just about do it. Doing everything in that order finally got it where I wanted it. It's at this point that you can ignore the mini and internal controls because now you have the core voice of the pedal set for the most part, and the big knobs on the front will help you play around in that area that is usable for you, but remember that you can still fine tune the core sound of the pedal with the 2 knobs in front in case you switch amps or other kinds of gear. From one guitar to the next, it's not that different. Like weaker pickups will let you bring sustain up a bit higher without sputtering and maybe your filter knob may need to be tweaked but that's it, just like any other 3 knob dirt pedal.
I haven't tried it with enough amps to comment, but I'm pretty confident that a little tweaking of the scoop and crunch controls can set you where you want to be at. Once you get that main voice you're looking for down, it should be smooth sailing. Right now, the pedal sounds good with the 4 amps I've tried it with from tube to solid state with minimal tweaking.
So yeah I hope that helps.
I mean there is also no shortage of people that can't find a sound they don't like out of the thing too, and I can't blame them at all. This pedal is remarkably good as coping the tones of other fuzz pedals while having a pretty identifiable default voice of its own. I mean I can get this thing to sound like a muff or a fuzz face or a destroyed speaker if I want it to now. Can't say the same about the other way around however.
So for me, it was kind of a pain at first, but if you stick with it, I can almost guarantee it will do what you want it to do within the realm of fuzz possibilities (short of having a blend control, but with the amount of low end that the thing can actually add rather than just retain, it isn't much of a problem). I even got close to setting it in so that I could almost clean it up with the volume control. I might have even been able to completely if I set the internal controls a certain way, and with a pedal that is marketed as a high gain silicon fuzz, that is pretty impressive. It can even get into the realms of overdrive and distortion tones.
Out of 5?
Versatility 5
Sound 4.5
Ease of use 2
Value 4
I'm keeping it on my board. It loves my wah pedal, and is really smooth and tight now that I have it dialed in. It'll be whatever fuzz you want it to be with enough love and effort put in. I wish it came with a better set of directions than just the postcard style manual though. Damn I wrote a lot. Probably shouldn't have had that last Redbull.
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