Fulltone is here!

(source – imgflip.com)

A belated Happy New Year to everyone out there in FP Land!

The end of the year was quite busy trying to juggle the usual family commitments with the end of year rush. However, on top of that, we were busy preparing our first videos for our new YouTube channel. Its a lot of fun putting together videos for everyone to check out the goods (in the real sense of the word) we have at Feedback Pedals. We are truly amateurs trying to do a pro job when it comes to hosting videos, but …we will keep working on making it more interesting and at least bearable to have to stare at our ugly mugs!

One of the first videos we did was actually to announce the addition of the Fulltone brand to our catalogue! It is awesome news for us and we are super excited to have these truly amazing sounding boxes of juice in our midst and to make them available to you! Fulltone is known the world over for its quality pedals and I wanted to take this opportunity to give a bit more information on them.

What to expect from Fulltone?

There are basically two types of boutique pedal producers – there are more, of course, but I am more talking about the brands we would be interested in at FP:) The first is a pedal maker that creates what would be considered as original circuits. These guys are looking to create new sounds and new capabilities on your pedal board.  Some of the producers I would put in this category are Dr. Scientist, Caroline Guitar Company, and Fairfield Circuitry The second category of builders are those that design and build pedals to emulate classic sounds. They achieve this in many different ways. Catalinbread looks to achieve classic sounds by building seemingly original pedals that emulate the sounds of the classic tones we fell in love with by listening to the Stones, Cream, Jimi and others. They emulate not only classic pedal designs but also entire amp tones, or the effects created by amp components. However, there are those that take a classic circuit that is seemingly no longer available to the public (i.e. no longer in production) and create “new versions” of these pedals, not only duplicating the tone you could achieve with them, but improving the pedal design and features. Fulltone is a master at this – probably the best!

Now almost everyone that has bought a guitar pedal in their life, whether it be a Behringer or Strymon, I am sure they have all heard of Fulltone’s OCD. It is at least close to the most successful model Fulltone has put out in their history. And this one, strangely enough, is an original circuit. Its best competition is probably the FullDrive-2 Mosfet, which was voted by Guitar Player magazine as one of the 50 best effects ever. So you see that Fulltone is very capable of doing both very successfully. They are known around the world for their quality, and supported by their history of building pedals for some of the most famous players in the world. The shortened list includes Mike Campbell, Kirk Hammet, Joe Satriani, John Mayer, Tom Petty, Peter Frampton, Gary Clark Jr., Paul Gilbert, Jeff Beck….the list goes on and on.  No matter what, with a list like that, you know you are doing something right!

So when looking at Fulltone’s lineup you really have the option of going into the world of “clones” or originals. Fulltone does both, and very well.

Of course we will be filling out the Fulltone lineup as time moves on with many of their juicy morsels of tone, but why not run through what we have on offer so far!

1. The Clyde Standard Wah – growing up in guitar pedal school, I am sure the Clyde Wah got a few jabs for being a guitar pedal named after a trumpeter. Such is the fate of some parents’ kids! But its nothing to be ashamed of at all! Clyde McCoy in many ways inspired the creation of the pedal in the first place with his plunger type muting of the trumpet you see many blues trumpeters use even today. And this sound brought Vox to create their Wah pedal evidently called the Clyde McCoy Wah. In steps Mr. Hendrix and the Wah pedal instantly becomes one of the most iconic and identifiable sounds in the history of the electric guitar. Mr. Fuller at Fulltone has taken this classic circuit and added some very useful tools to it to create the Clyde Standard Wah. Not only does this have more “travel”, giving you increased control, but includes a Fulltone designed “tapered” pot and a true bypass switch to help avoid colouring when the pedal is off. Easy to use, but with higher quality execution, the Fulltone Clyde gives you all the essentials that a wah pedal is capable of. I am sure we will be doing a bit of a Wah demo on our Youtube channel soon, but you should be able to find others in the meantime to get an idea of how good this sounds.                                                                                                                     
2. OCD V2 – An original design, the OCD has become one of the more prestigious and sought after modern day overdrives around. It is known to give the most convincing replication of tube amp overdrive, not only in a static way, but it really responds to your playing in the same way a tube would. It really brings that sweet juicy crunch you crave when you stomp down on it! The coolest enhancement of this version is the “Enhanced Bypass”, which adds back those dynamics you lose in the signal chain, even when the pedal is off! But of course the tone is really what you are after, and the controls give you the versatility to shape it to your liking withoutwrecking  the signal to find it. It is one of the purest sounding overdrives you will find. If you want to have a bit of a listen, we put up a video featuring several overdrives and fuzzes from Fulltone, including the OCD V2 here. Once you put this one on your board, you may never take it off!                                                                                                                                                                                 
3. Plimsoul – This is Fulltone’s attempt to give you a soft-clipped overdrive/gain pedal (a la Blues Driver, TS08, etc.) and hard-clipped gain pedal (a la Boss DS-1, Rat, etc.) in one pedal. And the critics and players alike are raving! The main controls (low-gain mode) are level, sustain (essentially the gain) and hi-cut (essentially the tone), where you can shape a very beautiful, yet sufficiently aggressive bluesy or classic rock drive tones. There is one other dial on this pedal called Stage 2. This is a mini dial, with huge implications! It takes your soft-clipping tone and drives it into a soaring hi gain tone that is perfect for lead or riffing to your heart’s desire. A Guitar Player’s Editor’s Pick, and one of the sweetest sounding pedals we have encountered (we also covered it a bit in our Fulltone video linked above), it will prove to be a very useful tool on your board!                                                                 
4. Full-Drive2 V2 – When Fulltone released the Full-Drive2 Mosfet years ago, it blew people away with its ability to be used as a dual overdrive easily switchable between rhythm and boosted lead. The list of mega-guistarists (came up with that word just now) is long and packed with full stadiums, long careers at the top of the charts and little gold statues. This, the latest version of the pedal uses the same circuit with tweaks and improvements to make the pedal more and more useful and bring more clarity to your tone. Including two toggle switches to allow you to shape the dynamics and EQ, its easy to find multiple sweet spots on this pedal.
5. And finally the Custom Shop MDV-3 V2 – Everyone has heard of the Univibe. In fact, it has almost become its own generic term, as it is an effect unto itself and, while similar to some modulation types, it is unlike any other type of effect. With the Mini DejaVibe 3, we are looking at an exact clone of the Univibe on the inside, with a housing and additional tools on the outside to, again, bring the versatility and “full-package” that other limited clones can’ t provide. There are other treadle based vibe clones out there, but, as you can hear when playing the Clyde Wah against your standard CB wah, you can very distinctly hear the quality difference! Look out in the future for a video on our channel featuring the Mini DejaVibe 3.                                                                             

Fulltone has a lot more goodies to look at on their site at www.fulltone.com. We have pretty much the entire Fulltone lineup at our disposal at anytime, so if you have any other model in mind, just give us a holler at info@feedbackpedals.com, or through our Facebook page and we will definitely help you out!