The Dude pedal [Guitar Content Only]

A very popular and incredibly expensive amp [Dumble] is sought out by many guitarists, until they learn the price. The last one I saw was listed at $50k, but I've heard that's not the most expensive. Users include Stevie Ray Vaughan (not anymore), Robben Ford, Larry Carlton, Ben Harper, and others. Dumble did some magic with the preamp to make a tone that's distorted at lower volumes and sounds great. You're not likely to get a new one these days, so others have stepped in, including Bludotone, Two Rock, and others, including Ceriatone, where you can get yours in kit form or magnificently built.

Carlton and Ford realized it was expensive to tote amps around Europe, so sometimes they found other ways. Ford used the Zendrive pedal, which is available in a few different forms and versions. There are so many Dumble-like pedals, it's near impossible to decide. Even the very cheap knockoffs can be had for well under $100. Here's where your work comes in: you need to research the pedals, whether locally, loan, or YouTube. YouTube is indispensable for hearing equipment. Whatever it is, someone put several demos on YouTube. The best video, in my opinion (it's my damn blog), is That Pedal Show's shootout of 7 pedals claiming D-tone. Let's ignore the fact that none of us have Dumbles and we may not be able to identify the tone. The guys thoroughly go through the pedals, that range from about $140 to about $600. The funniest/saddest entry was the combination of the Blues Driver and GE-7 Equalizer, which got them into the general neighborhood. The pedals were all pretty good, but I liked The Dude; for its similarity and tone in general.

At this level, we're subject to the 80/20 price/performance triple-tone Special Rule<tm>. This is where all the pedals sound great and close to their mark, but how much more are you willing to spend to sound the closest? I couldn't rationalize $600 for a pedal, so I waited for a good deal on a Dude. The Mad Professor Simble is another winner, to my ears, just from listening on YouTube. The aforementioned 80/20 price/performance triple-tone Special Rule<tm> also demands you look at the input and output jacks. You have to see whether they're on the front or the side of the box... this determines part of the tone*. I'm not going to give it away - do the research.       * I made that up

Special mention to Wampler. Everything I've seen of theirs is high quality and sounds great. Their entry was the Euphoria.  Let's not even speak of the Marshall pedals... tons to sound like every version of Marshall. Hint: listen to the MI Audio Super Crunch Box.

The first thing I noticed was The Dude was a lot smaller than I expected.
I have no idea why I expected a larger pedal, but there it is. I like big pedals - they're much harder to fit on pedalboards, and cause other guitarists to have fits. If you can't cause fits with your pedals, you have to do it with your playing. I am doubly talented, in that I can cause fits with either.  The pedal is also very solid, which is great as a weapon if the crowd (or other band members) attacks. Because The Dude traveled so far to get to my house, I let it sit in its box for 24 hours, to settle in and adjust its mojo to my house. If you play it too early, it may not have its mojo set yet, or use the mojo from its prior owner. Do you really want a pedal with mojo from Utah? Well, maybe you do... Utah is run by the Mormons, but consumes the most traffic from Pornhub of any state.

Where was I?
Oh yeah, Duding.
I assume you can power the pedal with a battery, but I wouldn't bother. It could take a week to get it open. Who uses batteries anyway? Ok, Eric Johnson prefers his batteries at 7v, but we're not Eric Johnson, are we? [If we are Eric Johnson, send me a message - we have things to discuss.] The pedal is black.. I hope I don't offend anybody by saying that. The writing is white, and I don't imagine it will show up well onstage. Since I rarely get onstage, it's a moot point. My wife would prefer a mute point.

I've been playing guitar since after the Moon landing, and I've collected huge amounts of Goodies. Naturally this means there is not a 9v adapter in the entire house. I think they hid when they heard I needed one. I just bought some other pedals and I know they needed adapters too. Nope - not one. So I discovered The Dude accepts a 9v battery, because I had to take one out of a different box, because we have no 9v batteries either. Do you see where this is going? I keep watching stuff leap off shelves at my wife. We're calling an exorcist later this week.

Fortunately The Dude works. I know this because the green light glowed. I never paid attention to LEDs until I got a Danelectro pedal with a piercing blue LED. The blue ones sound better than the green ones. Don't let anyone know I told you so. It will be our little tone secret, ok?

The YouTube demos get you the general idea, but you really have to play with something yourself (NO, don't do it) to get a real idea of how it handles. Let's start with the SRV fans: if you're buying this pedal to keep the gain all the way down and the volume up to overload your amp, you are going to be very disappointed. The volume control is heavily dependent on the gain control, so by the time you get much output, you have too much gain to cleanly overdrive your amp. This is the single warning I can pass along, but if you were that concerned, you'd have already bought a Tube Screamer, or one of the 666 variations of it.


Now for the fun part: the moment you plug in til the moment you have to be torn away from playing. This is a seriously fun pedal. Again, I have never played through a Dumble, but this pedal stands up well on its own. It has a very wide range of tones and way more gain than I thought it would. Forget using it for clean stuff or backing your guitar's volume to 2 - you'll just get less grit.

The Dude has 4 knobs: volume (volume), treble (treble), ratio (boost/gain), and deep (thick). They do more or less what you'd expect them to do. Deep is something you will need to play with. After playing around, I kept it at 9:00 because the tone got too 'large' above that setting. It probably wouldn't record well any higher.  Most of your attention will be focused on the ratio control. It goes from Smooth all the way to Too Much. I wound up with it around 9:00 too. It starts with a smooth, silky tone, which the treble control can do very little to ruin. I test stuff out through my Marshall Code 25 because it's tiny, solid state, and some of the presets are anemic, to be polite. If it sounds good through this, it will love my real Marshall and Fenders. The tone is large, brown-ish and smooth overall. It gets larger and way distorted as you turn it up, but still brown-ish. I think the key is not to crank the treble knob. In fact, it's almost too heavy (for me) past 12:00. It's fat and chewy at all levels. It doesn't sound like any pedals (or amps) I have, and I have a few. It's hard to give you a 'sounds like.'  It's more of an overdrive than anything else, with gain to spare.

Bottom line: buy the damn thing, used or new. If nothing else, it will give you a large, smooth tone to add to your palette. With a little tweaking, it will make you Larry Carlton and Robben Ford (assuming you can play like them). It's reasonably priced (roughly $140+ used, check Reverb) and music to my ears. I hate everything, so when I say something nice, it might be worth checking out. In the meantime, check out the reviews on YouTube.  I want to make my own channel, but video isn't my specialty and I'm too ugly to appear on video, so I'd have to find a good looking person to front for me (Sofia Vergara, anyone?).

If you have any questions, ask in the comments.
I'll post further observations as I play with it more (don't you dare).

At some point, I'll A/B it with the Lovepedal Superlead (dimed Marshall tones). If  I'm feeling particularly prickly that day, I'll A/B it with a phase shifter and a washboard.

It's Fender Mustang Time!

My laptops are out to get me.
I am not making this up.

Last night I did an update on my laptop and something bad happened.  With linux, you sometimes have to wait before bad things become apparent.  I booted up today after work and POOF - it refused to fully boot.  I knew immediately that this was going to be beyond my already pitiful patience level so I left it alone.  Later on I tried again.  I managed to get to a terminal but could not make the wireless work so that was done for the time being.  Strike one.

No problem, I thought.... I'd just get the backup laptop.  The backup laptop is a PITA that never really got much use because the touchpad doesn't play nicely with linux and the processor is a bit anemic.  So the backup laptop booted just fine, thank you, and flatly refused to connect to wireless.  Since I absolutely refuse to get up off the couch for anything short of guitar shopping, sex, or ice cream, I was not going to be able to connect the laptop to an ethernet cable.  Strike two.

It was obviously time to bring out Old Faithful.   Old Faithful is my old original Dell laptop that Marshall the Wonder Cocker tore a few keys from in a mad dash to get onto my lap.  It just kept chugging along, never letting me down.  The only small issue in booting it was that I could not find it.  How does one lose a laptop?  I certainly don't know.  But I will certainly curse my very being for an hour or three at some point down the road.  Strike three.

Good thing I'm the Anti-Sports.

Strike four may soon be provided by my wife's laptop, upon which I'm laying out this semi-rant.  These laptops are doing their level best to stop me from getting online.  Wife's laptop has thus far required about forty minutes of updates, as she hasn't touched it in a while.  But I want you, dear readers, to know that my wife uses a linux laptop with absolutely no direction at all.  This replaced her Windows laptop when it exploded (not a pretty story).  In any case, she gets all her email and surfing done on this laptop and rarely if ever has a question.  Yes, linux can work for you.


Now, speaking of guitar amps, some of my online friends have been going on and on about the new Fender Mustang modeling amplifiers.  Why yes, I do have friends; thanks for asking.

The Mustangs come in about four or five varieties, mostly differing in wattage and size.  They are modeling amps, which means they use chips and software to emulate popular real-world amplifiers.  Unfortunately, it also means no tubes.  We here at ThermionicEmissions have a very strict NO TUBES, NO TONE policy.  Yes, all of my amplifiers use tubes, from the tiny tweed Champ to the mighty Marshall.

My tube snob friends are starting to buy Mustangs and are really impressed by them.  This is most disconcerting.  You may not believe this but guitarists are extremely conservative types.  We like what we like and new things are treated with suspicion (for good reason).  Ever since solid state amplifiers appeared and were roundly dismissed as sterile and having crappy tone, manufacturers have been putting out amps and boxes claiming to have that `tube tone'.  We're kinda sick of the marketing (for good reason).  You might ask yourself how a two hundred dollar amplifier is going to emulate a vintage tube amp worth what you paid for your last car.

Strangely enough, I have been thinking about getting a tiny amp for the living room, where I do a fair amount of playing.  The Fender Mustang I is about ninety-nine dollars at Guitar Center so I went to check one out.  I figured at that price, if it turned on it was almost worth it.  Two months back I was ready to buy one but Guitar Center had none.  Working really quickly, two months later, they had a stack of them so I went and picked one up.

In addition to emulating amplifiers, the Mustang series will connect to your computer and you can play with the settings via software.  The amp comes with Windows software but there is a third party linux program available.  The amp can also record via USB.

It unpacked quickly and came with the power cord, USB cord, quick start manual (in many languages), and CDROM with software.  You also get other software, which I have not yet examined but is probably Windows-only.

The amp is, as my female friends say, cute.  It does twenty watts through an eight inch speaker, which is more than enough for the living room.   As I attend band practice with a fifteen watt Pro Junior tube amp, the wattage is roughly the same.

There is one input, a jack for a footswitch, and five knobs (GAIN, VOLUME, TREBLE, BASS, MASTER).  Fender goofed here, by printing the knob labels above the knobs, where you can't see them unless you're standing over them.

Following the `normal' knobs is a preset knob, a mod knob, and a dly/rev knob.  They're fairly self-explanatory.  There is a headphone out as well as an aux in, a mini usb port and a rocker power switch.

I cannot stress highly enough the amp's first and most important feature: the tuner.  Before doing anything else, tune your damn guitar please.  There are LEDs that indicate which note as well as RED-GREEN-RED LEDs to indicate tuning.  This is a tremendous extra that should almost be mandatory.

Without software, you use the amp like any other amp.  Use the preset knob to get one of eight basic amps, with two extra presets per-model, for a total of twenty four presets.  Tri-color LEDs indicate which set you're using (RED-GREEN-YELLOW).  If you don't know this, you're likely to miss it (I did).

Using the GAIN knob for crunchiness provides an interesting range of clean to dirty tones.  It's best not to judge anything on presets.  Presets are like blinky lights: there entirely for show and have no real world use.  Presets are the PowerPoint of the audio world.

The MOD knob covers a range of modulation-related effects, like chorus, flanger, tremolo, and phaser, among others.  The DLY/REV knob adds delays and a ton of different reverbs.

This amp line could not have been made ten years ago.  Think about the processing involved....

Software control brings more to the table.  I downloaded PLUG for linux and hooked right in.  There is a MIDDLE knob missing on the real amp, which is accessible through the software.  NOTE: if you're using Ubuntu, make sure to pay attention to the README file regarding the UDEV rule or the software won't connect.

There are some additional presets available in PLUG, as well as Major Tweakage.  You can tweeze to your heart's content, then save to the amp or the computer.

I would assume it's much more fancy in the Windows version (FUSE) but I haven't gotten around to firing it up yet, as the Windows computer is nowhere near the amp (and I hate Windows).

TIP: from my friend who is already deep into his higher-wattage Mustang.  Crank the SAG and BIAS controls (only available via software with the Mustang I) on all patches.

The amp seems to play well with different guitars: I used a G&L Legacy and an Historic Reissue Les Paul.  No idea if it prefers left-handed guitars (but I do).

I will add something to this review or post a new one after I get some time to put it through its paces.  It is an impressive little toy and for $99, I can definitely recommend it.  I will sit it next to some of the amps it emulates soon to see how accurate it is.  Make no mistake: I'm a tube snob and have a few really sweet vintage amps.  I don't expect this to duplicate a tweed Deluxe but we'll see how close it can get.