Effects Bay

The following is a guest post by Kevin Ian Common. If you are interested in guest posting, please contact me!

Hello Kind Readers!

I thought I would review another one of the pedals on my new pedalboard, the Barber LTD Special Recipe. What distinguishes this from the original LTD? According to the official website:

“The LTD SR came about when “yet* another *early beta LTD” came to our attention from a good friend and excellent player/listener. Our “beta friend” asked for a clone of his early beta LTD to have as a backup for traveling, after listening to and cloning his beta LTD we realized what a nice voice this version LTD posessed…so, the custom shop has made this cool third LTD version available for players seeking a “flatter voiced” LTD…*very* faithful to your guitar and amp’s unprocessed spectrum.”

This pedal first came to my attention when the original owner, a good friend of mine, started using it live. I loved his low-gain sounds and he told me about the LTD SR. It is a much flatter-voiced overdrive and perhaps the most neutral sounding overdrive I’ve ever played.

Like most Barber pedals, this one also has internal trim pots. I have not touched them, as I have this strange superstition that I will mess with the mojo of the pedal if I so much as open the pedal!

Since I also run a second overdrive and a fuzz, I tend to run my LTD first, and the cleanest, with very little gain at all. It adds a nice amount of dirt, and is so wonderfully voiced, even at it’s highest gain setting, I can hear the nuance of even the craziest chords I may play.

I’ve gone through many pedals and I’ve tried many pedals, but this one has been the most consistent overdrive pedal I’ve ever owned. I know many people swear by the green one… and the overpriced one touted by a member of The Police, but for the price… this blows both way far out of the water.

I’ve included two links. One is to a demo of the LTD SR with an les paul. It is a great demo!

The second link is to a clickable MP3 song of my band, The Common Men, playing one of our newest songs “Impulsion.” I use the LTD SR almost exclusively (with my fuzz in the choruses) and it is a great indicator of how lovely it fits in a “real-life” situation.

Thank You!

- Kevin Ian

Kevin Ian goes through pedals like most people go through underwear. However, once he finds one he likes, there’s no letting go! He is a multi-instrumentalist and internet radio DJ, and occasional blogger. He hosts “The Mad Owl” on sacrockradio.com which airs local and unsigned alternative/electronic/ambient acts. He is primarily the singer/guitarist for Norther California’s post-punk trio The Common Men. You can find everything about The Common Men at their new official website, www.thecommonmen.tk

The Barber LTD Special Recipe is available for $139.95 at Amazon.com

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After I posted the EHX Soul Preacher compressor/sustainer, @underwoodblog suggested I check out the Barber Tone Press Compressor. This definitely seems to be a great pedal and depending on what you want to do, this could be a great addition to your board.

Here is the official pedal description:

The Barber Tone Press Compressor Effect Pedal: tone and sustain with plug and play performance. Bringing together the very best of classic guitar compression and time-honored recording techniques, the Barber Tone Press compressor pedal is a revolutionary performance compression pedal that has no rival… A Tonal Breakthrough: How Barber Did It:  In research and development, Barber studied the problems associated with classic guitar compressors and their recent clones and found that, while the clone-makers build pedals with improved components (cleaner switching, in particular) and matched transistors, a few of the major drawbacks of those vintage designs still exist. The most glaring drawback of popular classic compressors is that they reverse the guitar’s phase and cause a pop (squashed attack anyone?) at the beginning of every note.

Although we now see some compression units that have attack controls, they leave a bit to be desired as they require seemingly endless trial and error tweaking – and no solution. The solution? Parallel compression, a Barber innovation that blows away having to deal with attack, ratio and release knobs of other so-called studio compressors. Barber developed a one-of-a-kind and quite proprietary continuous blend control circuit and combined it with a discrete Class A FET mixer circuit to allow you to continuously blend the natural signal of your carefully selected guitar with a phase-corrected classic compression circuit. The result? What guitar players have always wanted – unaltered attack and supernatural sustain and resonance, no studio engineering degree required.

I also found another great demo video by gearmanndude where he gets a little assistance with some serious compressed country pickin’

You can pick up the Barber Tone Press Compressor for $149.95 (includes FREE shipping) at Fat Tone Guitars!

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Taking a little break, I wanted to look closer at the Barber Half-Gainer Dual overdrive.  Various online conversations, Barber seems to continually pop up over and over in the overdrive discussion. The Barber Half-Gainer is new to me, but the concept sounds pretty sweet. The way I understand it, it’s basically dual Barber LTDs in a single pedal.

Here is the official details on the pedal:

The Barber Half Gainer Overdrive Pedal is the long awaited dual version of the very popular LTD ultra clear low gain overdrive. The Half Gainer adds new features for enhanced live performance. There is a new “mid character” control that simultaneously adjusts the midrange content and shifts the EQ curve to compliment the amount of midrange added or cut! Barber worked with pedal artist Bronson Wagner to achieve a very upscale graphic and paint presentation. Bronson tastefully applied Art Deco styling on a rich silver vein powder coat, for beauty with significant durability. The sounds that emanate from our new overdrive instrument range from subtle purrs, to an authoritative sweet grind. The Midrange Character control allows you to set the tone control to a nearly flat EQ balance for BIG chords that match your clean tone magnificently, or dial in a sophisticated fatness to thicken your single note lines to perfection.

The Half Gainer has control features that include; two channels with fully independent adjustments of output volume and gain for each channel. This is a tremendous step up from simply boosting schemes often implemented by other pedal companies. There are a shared Tone and Midrange Character adjustments on top the Half Gainer to keep things simple for quick live settings. The Half Gainer also has internal trim pots made by CTS to facilitate bass and presence balancing. The Half Gainer achieves these two independent channels in an enclosure that is only 3.7″ wide to save greatly on pedalboard space.  The Barber Half-Gainer Overdrive pedal is a great guitar effect pedal.

I found a couple of good videos. One is a very thorough demo by roknfnrol and the other is by ToneFactor

You can pick up the Barber Half-Gainer Dual Overdrive pedal at Fat Tone Guitars for $169.95!

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Since I’ve been talking and looking for different overdrives and potential distortion pedals for myself, I came across a fantastic comparison video by ProGruitarShopDemos featuring the Fulltone OCD, MI Audio Crunch Box and Barber Direct Drive. In the past, I talked about the Fulltone OCD and the MI Audio Crunch Box, so it was nice to see in the mix with the Barber Direct Drive. I wasn’t too familiar with this pedal, so I had to check this out. It’s clear they they all have some different nuances that each lacked, or gained. Overall, the Barber Direct was ‘darker’, but to me sounded the most natural. The OCD, which I think is a great pedal, had some nice sparkle. I also like the MI Audio Crunch Box, I think you could get that pedal really growling with the amount of gain it can pump out. I didn’t think there were any winners or losers in this comparison, but it’s great to hear the differences between them.

Fulltone OCD is available for $159.00 at Musician’s Friend
MI Audio Crunch Box is available for $129.95 at Musician’s Friend
Barber Direct Drive is available for $119.95 at Tunnel Vision Music

Remember, if you like reading about these pedals and seeing videos reviews from others, please subscribe to the RSS feed and get notified via email when there are new postings!

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