Updated on 12/29/15
You know how it is – you get money for Christmas, and the next day it’s gone because you’ve spent it on a pedal. Such was the case for me today. I went to my fave guitar center, and they had nothing in terms of good dirt pedals. Nothing. They used to carry a lot of Wampler pedals, but as they were sold, they never replaced them. I’m starting to wonder how much longer Guitar Center will be in business. They still get some new stock, but not as much as you’d like to see.
So off to Sam Ash in Tampa I went, because I knew they had a good collection. They also have subpar customer service and you can’t just grab a guitar and sit down and play it. I should qualify that – they don’t have enough employees working the floor during busy times, so you wait and wait and wait. The actual employees (in the 2 stores near me) do a good job – they know their stuff. It’s not their fault that they’re sometimes understaffed.
I wanted a dirt pedal. I have a good dirt sound on my Valveking micro head, and I already have a Plextortion, which is the Wampler version of a Marshall JCM 800. But I wanted a different kind of dirt – I wanted something more like a Marshall JTM-45 – more of a classic rock kind of vibe.
The contestants I tried out were the Catalinbread Dirty Little Secret, the Wampler Plexi-Drive, and the Wampler Pinnacle. I played them through a bright sounding Orange amp, with the volume set to 1, which was too loud for the store. This after waiting a good time to get someone to get me the pedals to try. Why is their “demo” amp a 100 watt tube head? This makes no sense. Their other demo amp is a Hot Rod Deluxe, but it’s set up right in everyone’s way. Some moron with a business degree and a tie probably decided on the store layout.
Dear Sam Ash, if you’d like to pay me six figures a year, I’d be happy to tell you how to make your stores not suck. Hell, I’ll do it for a new Gibson Les Paul.
Anyway…
I’ve tried them all before, but I tried them again. The Pinnacle sounds to me more JCM 800-ish – it’s a good sound, but not the classic rock sound I was wanting. The Dirty Little Secret sounded good – I liked it – but the Plexi-Drive was flat out better. It sounded bigger, and more like a real tube amp. So I bought it.
The Good
Through my Peavey ValveKing Micro tube head, the Plexi-Drive sounds really damn good. In fact, I could go so far as to say it sounds better than the real tube dirty channel at crunch settings. That’s exactly what I wanted. There’s a bass boost switch on the pedal, but even with that off the thing still has a bump somewhere around 100 to 150 hz. It makes the thing sound huge. There’s a gain knob, which controls the amount of gain (duh,) a volume knob which controls the volume, and a tone knob which controls the tone. There’s a bass boost switch but I don’t really need it. It’s stupid simple to use. At lower settings, it’s AC/DC crunch city. At higher settings, it’s a nice thick distortion. The distortion is smooth, not fizzy, and this pedal is super quiet for what it does. When you buy a Wampler pedal you know you’re getting quality gear.
The Bad
I could say the price. This thing goes for $200 new. It’s a lot of money for someone on a “budget,” until you price an actual Marshall JTM 45. There are other pedals that sound good for less money. But they don’t sound AS good. The lack of three band EQ is a little bit of a bummer – you get that in the deluxe version of this pedal. The pedal I bought is not the deluxe version – it’s the regular version with a plain white box, no spiffy British flag on it. Not a huge deal.
The Ugly
I was disappointed in what this pedal sounded like through my Hot Rod Deluxe III. It’s got a harshness to it that the Peavey didn’t have. I believe this is the fault of some bad preamp tubes in my HRD. But I would say this – I think this pedal sounds better when you use it with a slightly brighter amp. And with each passing day I’m liking my HRD less and less. Still, I do need to replace the preamp tubes, so there’s that. When I do, I’ll come back here and update this review.
UPDATE – I did not get new tubes, but I was able to tweak the amp’s EQ to get a better sound out of it. But the REAL magic happened when I put my yellow Strat* through it. Holy crap! I’m getting some very great tones out of it now. One thing to remember if you have really good pedals – the settings are more important than ever, and very small knob tweaks will change the sound. But I’m so happy with my Strat sound now. I’d been thinking of dumping my HRD, but not now. The pedal can make a good amp great.
Conclusion
I LOVE this thing. Through my amps it’s almost exactly the tone I was shooting for. The only way to get a better sound is to buy a Marshall JTM-45. This is the best dirt pedal I’ve ever played through. At some point in time I might still buy a Pinnacle, if I can get a good enough price on one. The problem with Wampler pedals is you almost never see them used in a music store – people usually keep them. But this pedal lives up to the hype – it may be the best dirt pedal ever made.
* This guitar is a budget guitarist’s dream – It started out as a Sam Ash 48th Street MIM Strat, with vintage frets and Tex-Mex pickups in an HSS config. I like Tex-Mex pickups. But the Tex-Mex humbucker is like a mean snarling dog that bites – and is only 12 pounds. Not “big” sounding like a humbucker should be. The single coil Tex-Mex pickups are good, but the Texas Specials are the same thing only better – fuller sounding, more growl, clean up better. I used that guitar in that config on my second album, “Never Completely.” But that guitar has been hot rodded and now it’s pretty great. Locking Grover tuners. I yanked the nut and put in a Tusq nut. I rolled the sides of the fretboard. I pulled the vintage frets and replaced them with Fender medium-jumbo frets. The pickups are single coil alnico V’s from GFS, the body cavity was converted to a swimming pool route via chisels and shielded with copper shielding tape. Obviously I replaced the pickguard. The bridge saddles were replaced with Graph Tech saddles. Aside from a few spots on the fretboard where a fret is still a teeny bit too high, this guitar is very unique to me.
