So, at the time of writing it is 2 days until Christmas. I’ve just finished semester 1 of what will be my last year in third level education, at least maybe for a while. Understandably the last year being the tail end of BA3 and the beginning of BA4 has kind of gotten in the way of this blog but for the last two weeks of 2021 it’s all plain sailing. I’ve also been revisiting Awaken My Love so I’m definitely feeling like I’ll be getting some of those lines back under my fingers over the break.
With final year, I have plans for closing my time in BIMM with some of the useful titbits and things I’ve picked up along the way but understandably that’s all on the long finger for now.
For now though, we really need to talk Jesus….
By which I mean the aptly named hybrid fuzz pedal, Jumpin’ Jesus on a Pogo Stick that thing is Loud by Analogwise.
During the Christmas shopping period mid-November, I stumbled across Analogwise’s Etsy page and promptly grabbed one of these units with both hands.
Analogwise ticks so many boxes for me both as a brand and as a pedal designer. All pedals are hand built in Warsaw, Poland and utilise recycled or upcycled materials as much as possible and packaged securely in as eco-conscious a manner as possible.
Unpacking the box, the tape is a biodegradable packing tape wrapping a reusable cardboard box stuffed with scrap plastic packets from other deliveries which would have otherwise ended up in landfill.
Packed with the pedal is an instruction sheet and usage guidelines which also details the efforts Analogwise have gone to limiting waste in the shipping process, printed on an A4 sheet of 100% recycled and unbleached paper.
We’ve also got an Analogwise pick, a wooden pick, and of couse, the pedal itself. But we’ll get onto that later.
Beyond the eco-friendly policy comes the pedal designs themselves. Specialising in analog Fuzz, Overdrive and Distortion pedals, Analogwise create the most amazingly versatile and high-quality units.
In a market where it can be difficult to do something new nevermind reinventing the wheel, Analogwise pedal designs focus less on ‘let’s make this pedal the next Fuzz/Overdrive icon’ or ‘let’s reinvent this classic’ and more on ‘how can we give the most amount of inspiration to the user, allowing them range and a multitude of sweet spots’.
Jesus himself is a perfect example of this design philosophy, ranging from a soft Big Muff drive to wet-car-sponge levels of warm, bubbling saturation to intense and coarse square-wave hair that would turn the heads of the fair side of most stoner rock bands.
“You’re looking at a handmade silicon / germanium fuzz pedal with tons of sweet spots on it. From light crunch to total doom, with sputtery, synthy, 8-bity choppy parts in between – it does it all.” (Analogwise, 2021)
Analogwise experiment freely with a blend of vintage germanium transistors, such as those used in the classic Tonebender, and modern op-amps to greatly broaden the splash of colour.
“This pedal is built with three transistor stages. The first one that your signal meets is a modern, high gain silicon stage. Through tone control, it feeds a vintage, NOS germanium transistor stage, that feeds another one just like itself.” (Analogwise, 2021)
As the name suggests, Jumpin’ Jesus is bloody loud, and reacts differently to the sonic sacrifices you feed it whether they be Humbucker or Single coil.
Feeding single coils such as my ’92 Lawsuit Telecaster, the pedal boasts so much movement and maneuver from Satisfaction to Modern era Jack White. With humbuckers, we get the same range of maneuver but with more of a heavyweight punch much earlier. With a neck position humbucker and setting the bias to a sharp release we can get a warm synthetic, brassy sound.
As always thanks so much for reading, I hope you enjoyed it and if you have any questions on gear, recording or anything music related please feel free to drop us a line via the festively decorated and gorgeous contacts page.
Stay safe and from all the team here we hope you have a Merry Christmas and a joyful 2022.
A Study in Audiosynthesis 