Magnetic Effects
Christian Livingstone is an experienced touring
musician from New Zealand who has rocked out all
over the world with The Datsuns—a fiery supercharged
rock band that remind me of The MC5. When he is not
melting faces live on a nightly basis, he makes tools for
face melting from his base in South London. Magnetic
Effects represents everything that is cool about a
successful boutique pedal company—handmade
pedals using top shelf components, awesome original
and tweaked classic circuits and last but not least,
killer graphics. My favorite box so far is the Double
Feature, which is now firmly fastened to my board. It
is essentially an adjustable fixed wah rammed into a
harmonically rich ground-up-designed germanium
distortion—notice I didn’t say fuzz. The tone is strangely
both modern and vintage, which is very unique. I look
forward to reviewing more from Magnetic Effects;
this is a boutique company with a bright future.
4114 Custom Effects
4114 Custom Effects comes from a relatively new
angle of cloning expensive boutique pedals and
building them to full customer spec. Of course, us
pedal nuts know 4114 as the builder of the Flux
Capacitor Delay, that thing went viral instantly,
thrusting a DIY enthusiast in front of a global audience
and forcing him to handwire over 5000 components
per unit, while answering countless emails from
around the world. Sound like a dream job?
This is a fine example of how life’s little sonic
adventures get started and a perfect way to end this
feature full cycle. Speaking of cycles, Britain was in
some ways the birthplace of boutique pedals with
Roger Mayer and Pete Cornish making custom
jobbies for their rock star clients back in the day. As
a bloke who lived through the initial boutique pedal
boom in the USA, I am well chuffed to see the spirit of
the age floating overseas. It’s about bloody time.
ToneReport.com
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