groundmeat wrote: ↑Mon Nov 30, 2020 10:29 am
Finally got hip to this phenomenon known as the Rangemaster. ... Ended up settling on a Greer Amps Moonshot. ... I've been somewhat of a doubter of boost pedals. My philosophy was kinda like, "If you need a boost, you need a better amp." Trying to open my mind and realize the possibilities. So hopefully this pedal isn't a let down. We shall see.
Hmm, okay, okay, I think I'm on board with the boost religion now. Because I don't know how I'd ever go back to life without one now, hehe.
I will say one thing, it's lucky that I have a noise gate now. Without it, I would not like this Greer Moonshot pedal. I guess these Oranges in high gain tend to have a good bit of background hiss, and boosting or using a compressor (which almost does the same kinda signal boosting thing to an extent) just boosts the volume of that noise along with your tone. Without a noise gate, that background noise is un-ignorable and ruins your sound. I've read peoples reviews of different noise gates and some people claim that certain ones have pretty bad "tone suck". This old 70's/80's MXR Noise Gate Line Driver is completely transparent as far as I can tell. It was kinda surprising, I was expecting an old pedal like this to have that type of flaw to it, but nope, it's great.
Not sure if it's a defect in this particular pedal, but I notice a strange high pitched square-wave overtone when using this thing on the clean channel, which is what I've heard you're really not supposed to do with a Rangemaster anyway, but... I dunno, maybe I'll email Greer and ask if that's normal.
On the dirty channel, it's great. Max out the VOL knob and turn the TREBLE/MID knob all the way to the left for the treble end of the range, and that's pretty much the Rangemaster sound I guess. Was getting some spot on early Iron Maiden and Judas Priest sounds. And it seems like the peculiar "Orange sound" is a bit softer textured with less treble than a Marshall. And to my ear, this thing adds just the perfect amount of treble and brightness to the amp. Speaking of the Rockerverb 100 mk3 only. I've tried other smaller Oranges that had brasher treble to them, so I dunno that a Rangemaster style pedal would be a good idea with those.
The TREBLE/MID knob doesn't VASTLY effect the tone. The max end of the treble is not screeching, and neither is the max end of the mid side. Some people might complain about that with this pedal, and I'm kinda tempted to... but then again, it does seem to replicate that authentic Rangemaster sound good enough, and that's what I was looking for, so that's good enough for me.
And I dunno if I'm mistaken about this, but for some reason I was under the impression that Greer pedals were hand-wired. They might be hand built, and the connecting wires might be soldered by hand, but they feature a typical circuit board. Wasn't able to find a picture of the internals of one of these, so I tried to take a few shots. Sorry if they aren't so great, this camera is pretty old and tricky to get good clear closeup shots with. But as you can see, the wires are bent around the sides of the chasis in ways that lets you have access to the board, and probably uses more wire than is absolutely necessary in doing so, which maybe isn't penny pinching and cost effective. But it tells me that the person putting these things together is meticulous and takes pride in the appearance of their work and cares about what they are doing.
"Bluto is a flyer". I dunno what that's about. I googled it and all I could find was a special edition Popeye PF Flyer shoe with Bluto printed into the sole.