and brutish. Fairly standard boost and
drive tones, gelatinous fuzz, metallic
attack—it’s all in there and more, thanks
to three clipping options, a switchable
second gain stage, bass cut switch,
mids frequency selector, a clean blend
knob, and an active three-band EQ. The
most distinctive feature of this compact
distortion powerhouse, though, is its
expression pedal jack, which lets the
player control the clean blend on the fly,
morphing from sparkly clean or gently
broken up tones, to full-on molten fury.
It’s a really cool feature that opens up a
whole new world of expressive distortion
possibilities.
limb by an 8-bit computer. It’s got lots
of knobs and switches and is sort of
intimidating to look at, but it’s endless
fun for the demented, destructive child
in all of us. Sort of like dropping an M-80
in a school toilet, the Geiger Counter
has the potential to fill any unrepentant
maniac with a profound sense of devious
glee. It’s actually capable of some really
good, normal distortion tones as well,
but no one should buy this pedal for
such a pedestrian purpose. The Geiger
Counter’s strength is its unhinged squarewave-meets-quantization-error onslaught.
Get one and go nuts.
WMD GEIGER COUNTER
William Mathewson makes some rather
extreme sound mangling devices, and
his masterpiece is undoubtedly the
Geiger Counter, a safety-yellow-finished
sonic nightmare consisting of a highgain preamplifier being torn limb from
12
TONE TALK //
5 Unconventional Dirt Boxes