When I was working as the marketing arm for Dr. Brenda E.F. Beck’s animated series, The Legend of Ponnivala , I was struck by an interesting idea that hadn’t occurred to me before in the legends I had studied: that origin stories very often have their roots in the ancestral shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural society. In the Ponnivala story (which is an English adaptation of the local Tamil legend, Annanmar Kathai , or “The Brothers’ Story”), there is a region of forest that the goddess Parvati wishes to see become fertile and productive, and so she creates nine men who will be the farmers of this land. Now, from the perspective of a people who have farmed the region for many hundreds, if not thousands, of years, this makes sense; taking virgin land and taming it to feed the people is a reasonable expenditure of effort. Except, this is the South Indian jungle we’re talking about. Can there be any doubt that this dense forest was already “fertile and productive” before being cle
High gain is where heavy metal lives, and since the 80s there's been no shortage of both amps and pedals designed to capture the right amount of clipping, distortion, grind and punch to deliver what demanding metalheads crave. A few years ago, Horizon Devices came out with their Apex preamp and Precision Drive, and these have since become industry standards for boutique-built sonic fury. The Precision Drive especially, developed by Misha Mansoor, is a djentleman's dream...a tight, crisp overdrive that doesn't overburden the amp tone, combined with an onboard noise gate that clamps the signal between notes, giving the user a scalpel-like precision in hard and fast rhythm passages. Well, this fall there are three signature dirt pedals that are making a huge splash in the marketplace; so much so that their builders are having trouble keeping them in stock. What's remarkable about these, though, is that of the three, only one is actually made by a traditional pedal company.