DIMARZIO VIRTUAL VINTAGE HEAVY BLUES 2, AIR ZONE AND TEXMEX

Hello everyone, I am going to share some sound clips of my newly installed pickups on my Strat. I hope you will enjoy these clips and make good use of them. Some notes first: the Virtual Vintage Heavy Blues 2 does scream in high gain pretty well but I didn't have time to capture it. I'll try to get the recording next time.

On the other hand, Air Zone definitely sounds fantastic! It doesn't sound similar to any other DiMarzio humbuckers I've tried, this is very unique. It's not a total screamer, it doesn't make your sound muddy, it has definition and good pick attack. I really like it, it's very versatile.

The combination of the VVHB2 and the standard TexMex is very amazing! I can get a very funky clean tone out of the combination and it really works very well!

Here are the clips:
VVHB2: Clean wet, Jazz comping, Dirty
VVHB2+TexMex: Funk
TexMex+AirZone: Funk
AirZone: Clean, Dirty

Hope you enjoy!
Cheers and God Bless :)

BYOC TRIBOOST

Hey everyone, I'm back with a new pedal called Triboost. It belonged to my friend Anthony Woen and I am very lucky to have this home-made clone pedal in my pedalboard for testing right now. It sounds awesome, it doesn't price too high and you can build it yourself and save some money.

BYOC
This company sells you ready-to-make clone pedals of well-known pedals such as Tube Screamer, Boss Chorus, etc. The company provides easy-to-follow instructions for assembling the pedals. Most of the pedals are not too hard to build even if you have a minimal experience in soldering. All of them feature true bypass switching and high quality components(ICs are usually good NOS chips!).

Three in one
This pedal is actually three boosters being made into just one pedal in a compact sized enclosure. It features three mode:
- Green: based on a generic MOSFET clean boost that is available around you. It adds a bit of dirt when you dial the boost a bit high.
- Blue: based on a linear booster. This is simply the cleanest among all three, doesn't add too much dirt and colors your tone minimally.
- Red: based on a Dallas Rangemaster boost. It uses NOS germanium transistor to achieve the Beano/Rangemaster sound. It has the most dirt compared to all and you can also adjust the boost frequency using the top rotary knob; you can choose from full, treble and mid boost on this mode.

This pedal intended to work strictly as a booster and not as an overdrive. If you expect this pedal to do an overdrive sound, you'll probably be disappointed. Use it as a booster on either clean or dirty channel and you'll immediately hear some classic boost sounds on each modes. Absolutely fantastic!

Worth the money?
I can't see why not! This pedal does work as what its advertised. A three in one booster is one of the rarest thing in the world. As long as you can solder neatly, you'll get a good quality pedals in your hand. There's a Canadian seller that sells BYOC pedals that are already assembled if you don't want to solder the pedals by yourself. This one is priced at $95.00 and you can buy it on BYOC website: www.buildyourownclone.com. An LPB will cost you around $40.00, MOSFET booster at around $100.00 and Rangemaster Booster clone at around $100.00; three of them separately cost $240.00 approximately and this Triboost only cost you $100.00.

From 0 to 10?
Depending on how good you build the pedal yourself. Nonetheless, it will be 10 if you do a great job. I recommend this pedal for a less expensive solution for finding a booster pedal.

Here's the sound clip of this pedal. Clean - MOSFET - Linear - Rangemaster Full - Rangemaster Treble - Rangemaster Mid. CLICK HERE for the sound clip.

Cheers and God bless :)

RC BOOSTER

Yes, it's finally here in the blog! The ultimate clean boost machine is now available for reviewing. After spending some time with this pedal, I'm finally able to share some cool stuffs that this pedal has to offer.

Xotic Tremendous Trio

First, let me explain the concept of Tremendous Trio by Xotic. The Tremendous Trio are actually three booster/overdrive pedals that Xotic has to offer: BB Preamp, AC Booster and RC Booster. You may wonder, what's the difference between the tree? They are all almost identical, they have similar control knobs and they're all booster pedals.

Well, they are in fact very different...

... in terms of gain level, sound characteristic and function. A cranked up RC booster will sound like a near-breakup vintage tube amp on a clean channel while an AC booster will deliver Tube Screamer like quality with more warmness; as we already know, BB preamp has the highest gain and can really drive an amp into a high saturation level. In terms of sound characteristic: RC booster is clean and smooth, AC booster is somewhat more mid-scooped compared to a TS and BB preamp have the most amount of warmness compared to the others.

RC Booster in more detail

I said above that RC Booster is clean and smooth: it's not just clean, it's TRANSPARENT. That means, you can use it as a clean boost to increase your volume level without adding gain or altering your tone. You can add some bass or treble depending on what you want but you can really keep your original tone as it is. This is very useful for a clean lead tone where you need extra volume boost.

Personally, I use the RC Booster only on the clean channel. When I tried to use it on an already overdriven amp, I can't really get a volume boost and I don't really need to get extra gain out of it. I once tried to use this as a tone modifier to make my single coil sounds warmer and it did a great job on doing that. Well, there's actually many ways that you can use this pedal to suit your needs. Leave it on all the time with minimum amount of gain and added level increase, it will help to bring out your long-cable-degraded tone back to life while boosting your tone.

Please remember

This won't give you a massive amount of distortion as I mentioned before, so don't really expect this pedal to work on a high-gain situation although it will still surely provide something useful in that case. This also doesn't work as a compressor although it can boost your output and add some sustain. Don't get disappointed when it doesn't provide you with enough gain and massive amount of compression, it's not really what it's designed for. Remember that there are AC Booster and BB Preamp that provide more compression and more gain compared to this baby.

Is it worth?

Current retail price of around $170.00, it's an expensive pedal for sure. But for its true bypass capability, boutique quality, tone enhancement features and unique functions, I would say that this thing worth every penny. Clean boost and tone enhancer is not really something that you may want, but give this pedal a try and you'll surely know why Xotic made this pedal.

From 0 to 10?

9.5. Cheaper price can bring it to 10 for sure. Xotic is a very expensive boutique pedal maker, but for a price this high you'll get something with a very high quality.

Sound clip: CLICK HERE, first original signal then RC booster with minimum gain maximum volume, and then RC booster maximum gain and volume, I backed off the treble a little bit by the way.

Cheers and God bless :)