The
Vulture started its life, when Michael plugged in one of the very first
pedals we made. That pedal had a certain sound to it that we really
liked, but it was a bit grungy in the low-end. We wanted to make a pedal
with that sound, but with a tighter, less fuzzy low end and with more
gain.
We opened up the pedal and painstakingly measured everything in
it, to find out why it sounded so good, and found a couple of resistors
that would be better with other values.
Was it modified earlier in
life or was this just a very good sounding mistake from when it was made
in Lars´ basement way back in the 90´s?
All we know is that the
basic sound was cool and we left it at that, and went on to focus on
getting the low-end tight - but BIG!
The fruit of our labor is a
pedal that has a great, throaty distortion with a nice bite to it but
the low end and low midrange can be shaped in many ways, thanks to the
low- and fat-boost knobs. This allows the player to dial in almost
stupid amounts of lows, but the distortion stays tight, not muddy.
LOW-BOOST AND FAT-BOOST? ISN´T THAT OVERKILL? Well,
we could have left it at a “bass”-knob, but that will only get you so
far. The low-boost will add a lot of what we all love about those heavy
4x12 cabs, but that is not necessarily what you need if you are looking
for more “body” in the sound, although it can turn that small combo you
play at jam-nights into something bigger.
The fat-boost is designed
to add weight and punch to the sound, giving the top strings a lot of
thickness – almost like you went up two steps in string gauge, and the
punch is more of a “punch in the chest” than a “kick in the #€%”.
The
secret to the Vulture is to adjust the boost and tone knobs for optimal
sound when the gain is adjusted, just like on an amp. It is tempting to
turn everything up, but we still remember what happened when we turned
the boost knobs off and set the gain above 3 o´clock…”uhm, maybe I don´t
need a two-channel amp after