MotherTone

WOW! Long time no post! Things have been really crazy lately and I haven't had the time to sit down and write some reviews (and haven't had the means to record new clips until recently either). Oh well, I hope to get back into the flow of pedal/gear reviews and hopefully keep the cycle going.

So recently the guys over at Wounded Paw Effects updated the circuit of their fabled Battering Ram Guitar/Bass fuzz pedal. They changes were minor, consisting of a "split" switch that allowed the fuzz portion of the circuit to be accessed without the overdrive part of the circuit coming first. As always you can find more information at www.woundedpaw.com/effects

Here is what they had to say about the updates:

"The Battering Ram now has a new feature, the Split switch. The Battering Ram was developed to run the Overdrive sides in parallel when the Fuzz is switched on, but bowing to pressure we've changed this. The Split switches allows you to run the channels in parallel or separately. With the Split switch in the up position, when you hit the Fuzz stomp switch, the overdrive gets switched off at the same time."

There were a lot of things that I liked about the ram and I also remembered a lot of the things that I didn't like about the ram as well.

Overall I think that it wounded better to my ears, but at the same time I have a completely different rig and bass than I did when I owned it before. Like I think even the cables have changed, haha.

The overdrive section definitely added some girth to my tone that I really enjoyed in the lower gain settings. The higher gain settings definitely were to muddy and fuzzy for my tastes. I think that when the gain was in the last third of the dial, it was into what I would call fuzz territory. Aggressive! I really liked either having the Hi knob at noon for lower gain warmth or at like 2 or 3 o'clock for higher gain settings (my favorite setting with my P-bass with flats, great stoner/doom setting). On the down side, I thought that it got muddy fairly quickly and isn't really good for that modern brash sounding OD, but great for that stoner/doom sound.

The fuzz side, like the OD side, also sounded better than I remember. It felt like it was fuller and ballsier than I remember, but again that could have everything to do with my current bass/set-up. It is fuzz is really well rounded, IMO, maybe even more than the OD side. The octave up switch added that cut throat brash-ness to the signal that was the first time I felt like I liked that sound, even if the upper end of the frequency spectrum wasn't fully perceptible in a band setting to my ears. It may be perfect with a wah for that Cliff Burton kind of fuzz/wah sound. My favorite way to use the fuzz, other than to go from sweet OD to killer rock god fuzzy-ness, was to turn down the output of the fuzz side and use it with my Iron Ether Nimbus for those super huge volume swells that Brian Cook from Russian Circles does a lot. This allowed me to have a boost for my OD and have a reined in fuzz sound without having to knob twiddle on my Pickle Pie B mid-song (which I hate doing). I had never thought about doing something like that the first time that I owned the pedal. One of the cool things about playing with a pedal the second time through.

My main gripe with the Battering Ram the first time I owned it was that because the two sides of the pedal were wired together, if I found an OD setting that I liked, I felt like I had to compromise the setting on the fuzz side. And vice versa. The "split" switch solves this problem and really opens up the versatility of this pedal, IMO. Even though I now don't feel like I have to compromise with either side of the pedal in order to get the sounds I want, and use the signal with out the switch, I think that this is a vast improvement over the previous version, from a versatility stand point. Whether this is because I have the fuzz tone that I was trying to get covered with my Pickle Pie B and now I can use the fuzz in a different way, or if I am just happier with the tone of the Ram with my current set-up, I can't say. Perhaps I am just more experienced with fizzes in general.

MotherTone

Friday, November 11, 2011

Wounded Paw FX: Battering Ram V.2.0