Empress Heavy

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Milkman
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Posts: 443
Joined: Wed May 27, 2020 1:49 pm
Location: Ottawa, ON, Canada

I had a chance to borrow this pedal from a friend of mine for a few days to see if it tickles my fancy.

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I had it plugged into my Traynor YCS50 (with an attenuator connected). This amp is usually on the warm or thick side, which is a good thing, because this pedal leans toward the bright and fuzzy side. On the clean channel of this amp, I have the choice of having Brit or USA mode - and things definitely sounded better in the Brit mode.

There's a lot of controls on both sides of the amp and they all affect the others a lot, so there's a lot of twiddling knobs to find setting that pleases my ears. In particular, the "Weight" knob controls the tightness of the low end distortion, but works closely with the (global) setting of the "Low" knob. Having the mid frequency switch to select where the mid-boost is placed really helps with switching guitars that have different brightness characteristics.

The built in noise gate worked pretty well for me, the natural setting kept the noise down but didn't choke off notes. I didn't play too much with the aggressive setting, since I don't really play a lot of chugga-chugga.

To me, this pedal's gain range starts somewhere near Judas Priest British Steel tones (on the Heavy side of the pedal) all the way to the heaviest, djenty, downtuned goodness you could ask for (on the Heavier side of the pedal) - but I couldn't dig up any good hard rock tones for playing AC/DC, Cult or anything like that.
"Everything works if you let it." - Travis W. Redfish

Joined AGF April 10, 2013
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