Woods & Strings

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....

Insane sound from a mini pedal After years of scaling back to just my amp tone, I've started getting back into guitar pedals. 20 years ago, if you couldn't afford the Boss or DOD pedals, you were forced to go with the only budget brand out there: Rocktek. Those things were awful, but affordable. These days, the budget brands are king, in my opinion, and the compact size of the circuitry makes it possible to grab anything you want and try it out for less than fifty bucks. I wanted to start out with a good distortion, and after playing around with online reviews I decided to take the leap to the Donner Giant Metal. This little powerhouse lives up to its name! Super solid aluminum construction, easy to use controls, a fairly wide gain profile, and surprisingly flexible tonal control. It just has the one tone control, and the switch boosts highs or lows (top or bottom), or runs right down the middle. I won't say that this can replace a high-end Boss distortion, but if y...