Way Huge pedals

Way Huge were known for a certain quirkiness, naming pedals Red Llama, Foot Pig, Aqua Puss, Saffron Squeezer and so on, and I’m glad to see that the tradition is being continued in the new range, with the Swollen Pickle name in particular returning to the public arena. Even the cardboard boxes containing the pedals get in on the act and feature black-and-white cartoon graphics starring Mr Huge, the mutant tonologist. You even get some box candy in the shape of a couple of small badges, a warranty card and some Jim Dunlop promotional material. What you don’t get is a battery, which, especially at the price you have to pay for these pedals, is a bit of a cheapskate from where I’m sitting.

For all its fancy names, the Fat Sandwich is a good old-fashioned distortion pedal, designed to sit in front of any clean amp, drive all the headroom out of it and deliver crunchy, clipped distortion tones by the ton. The Fat Sandwich has plenty of volume on offer and all you’ll have to worry about here is making sure that you’re not overdriving your amp’s front end. The skill in using the Fat Sandwich lies in balancing up the Tone, Presence and Resonance controls to get you the tonality that you’re looking for at your chosen distortion level. I started out with the Overdrive at 12 o’clock, Tone at 12 o’clock, Presence flat out, and did my first tonal setup using just the Resonance control, which shapes the pedal’s lower frequency response. Having got that right to give my Strat Plus plenty of body, I pulled the Presence back until I felt happy, and then used the Tone to lightly tame the high frequencies and round out the distortion a bit. All that is left to do is set the Volume control to the point where you get the desired amount of difference in volume when you kick in the Fat Sandwich.

Winding up the Distortion control brings in a really heavy saturated distortion, replete with all the harmonic overtone content you could ever want, and shows you just how effective the two cascaded distortion stages are. Personally, I didn’t feel the need to get inside the Fat Sandwich and tweak anything, as the front panel controls did what I wanted, but the mere fact that you can tweak away internally is a huge bonus should you feel that there’s just that last ounce of performance to be got out of it.

In the Pork Loin pedal, the internal presets are Filter, adjusting the tone of the clean preamp; Drive Mix, setting the amount of overdrive in the mix (if you turn it all the way down, all you’ll get is the clean preamp); and Presence, giving you an extra layer of control over the high frequencies.

Setting the Pork Loin up is pretty much a case of turning down the clean, getting the overdrive sound right with Curve and Tone controls, and winding up the Overdrive to taste. Turning up the Clean control effectively adds clarity and definition, especially with lower distortion settings, and after that you’re again into setting the volume level when the Pork Loin is in circuit.

In use, the Pork Loin isn’t the subtlest of pedals, with an overdrive sound that has a touch of the fuzz pedal about it. Compared to one of my own pedals that has the same clean/overdrive combination, but with a tight, sparkly distortion, it produces a darker, more saturated sound that drives heavy, detuned riffs along beautifully. This is one pedal where getting into the internal presets makes a real difference. If you drop the Drive Mix back to somewhere around halfway, you’ll be able to get more clean sound into the mix and that’ll give you just that bit more definition in your riffs.

The Swollen Pickle was one of the original Way Huge pedals, debuting in 1997 with the slogan “more fuzz than a mouldy peach”, and its MkII incarnation is no less fuzzy. With more controls than I’ve ever seen on any other fuzz box, the Swollen Pickle is capable of producing all the classic fuzz sounds, from crunch all the way up to the stinging sustain that only a fuzz box can deliver. That panorama is under the overall control of the aptly named Sustain control, which, together with the Crunch knob that sets the amount that the fuzz compresses, governs the dynamics in the effect. The Filter control is a band-pass filter that sounds best to me set high up its scale, although turning it down tends to blur the articulation of individual notes, turning a single-note line into a singing stream — as we all will want to do at some point.

The really interesting control is the front-panel Scoop knob, which, as you might expect, scoops out the mids in your sound. The amount of scoop is controlled by the internal Voice preset, which sweeps between light and heavy mid-cut. The second internal control is Clip, which varies the amount of signal going to each of the Swollen Pickle’s two sets of clipping diodes, to give you a smoother or grittier basic fuzz. Finally, the front panel Loudness knob controls the output level and has plenty of it, although the output compresses a bit at higher levels and the last quarter turn actually doesn’t do all that much — but if you’re up there it’ll be that compression that you’re after.

Setting the Swollen pickle up is a pretty intuitive affair, as with all the Way Huge pedals, and simply involves setting up your fuzz tone with the Crunch and Sustain controls, balancing Filter and Scoop to give you the tone and sustain you’re looking for and then dialling in the right amount of volume with the Loudness control.

At more restrained Sustain and Loudness levels, the Swollen Pickle does a nice line in crunchy sounds that work pretty well with E5- and A5-based chordal riffs, but that’s not why you’d be buying it. Winding these two controls up into the meat of their operating range brings you fuzz tones to be loud with and proud of. I found myself keeping the Crunch set pretty high and using the Scoop to take out the lower mid-range when things got a bit flabby. Internally, I had the Clip set to give me a bit of grit and the Voice positioned at its midpoint, these being my personal preferences.