Mr. Sage Black Pearl Distortion #6, Swankbox, Custom Painted, Boutique Swollen Pickle Clone

Here's something I guarantee you won't find anywhere else. It's a custom painted Black Pearl Distortion. One of my first forays into custom boutique pedal offerings (circa 2006) was to commission seven of these pedals from Zach Dillon (a.k.a. MrSage on the Harmony Central Effects Forum). MrSage wasn't aspiring to be a boutique effects builder, but he had built a good number of DIY stompboxes as a hobby and was selling a few pedals he had made on the forum. He called his pedal the Black Pearl Distortion (a clone of the Way Huge Swollen Pickle), and a lot of people seemed to like it.

MrSage's Black Pearl Distortion originally came in a standard die cast enclosure powdercoated in a plain, textured black finish. My idea was to have Zach build me a small batch of his Black Pearl pedals into custom painted enclosures. There was a company called Swankbox, started by another forum friend, Adam (a.k.a. Adolf, a.k.a. #16), that was creating some really impressive custom finished enclosures. So I bought a bunch of them and sent seven of them to MrSage to make into Black Pearl Distortion pedals. I am 99.9% certain that these were the only Black Pearls built into Swankbox enclosures.

I had originally intended to sell the lot of them and keep one for myself. Serial numbers 1 through 5 have long since been sold. I couldn't make up my mind which color I wanted to keep of the last two, so I kept both. The time has now come to let them go. These last two are extra special, as we added a three way toggle switch to offer variations in the level of the mids (some people felt the stock Black Pearl had too much of a mid scoop, and MrSage himself later began employing this mod). This is Black Pearl Distortion #6 (of 7) with the Swankbox finish.