10 year old Goosoniqueworx Kult - Killer Cascaded-JFETs High Gain Distortion is finally in the collection

As featured in my recent Discontinued Rarities article and as mentioned on the site at least a couple of other times - I’ve been after the Gworx Kult Distortion Pedal for quite a while. In fact this is the 3rd or 4th opportunity I’ve encountered - and this time around was the right price / quality and timing. For the previous opportunities I was already committed in other areas - so it’s nice to finally pin down this monster - which does the extreme high gain distortion thing particularly well.

Goosoniqueworx / Gworx is Singaporean Ravi Goose who started dabbling with guitar electronics and effects in around 2002. His most active period seems to have been 2010 to 2017 where he delivered a number of great sounding mostly gain pedals - including the Blitzkrieg, Fuzzyduck, Seventheaven / 7thvn and of course the Kult - which is based on a similar cascaded JFET topology to the 7thvn but manages to wring an extra ounce or two of distortion out of the circuit as one of the coolest high gain circuits you might be able to get your hands on.

Since 2017 Ravi seems to have suspended the pedal business - while his current GworX entity is still involved with guitar electronics - looks like primarily guitar electronic tune-ups and repairs.

I’ve always thought the Kult sounded great in demos - with a killer deep low-end and superb textured crunch.

Controls - Volume, Presence / Feedback, Presence / Feedback Switch, Treble, Mid, Bass, Gain, EQ : 1 / Pre-EQ / 2, Green / Red Channel Footswitch, Engage / Bypass Footswitch.

And the hands-on experience mostly lives up to the promise. I would say that with 9V power supply it doesn’t go nearly loud enough, while it mostly does the job at 18V - I personally would like just a touch more output. The Kult sits somewhere between Vintage and Modern gain voicings - where it’s tighter than the old-school high gain distortions - but not quite at the level of percussive tightness of some of those modern Djent-style pedals.

That said, it delivers a wonderfully richly textured distortion - I need to do a head to head really against some of my monster Extreme distortions - to establish which one is the Heavyweight champion - and I have several that qualify - including the likes of the Blackhawk Sauron, Boss Keeley-Modded Metal Zone, Custom Audio Art Ultrasonic, Empress Heavy, Klirrton Grindstein, KMA Guardian of the Wurm, MI Effects Megalith Delta, Noise Space Audio OpenDrive, REVV G4, Rockfabrik Mind Abuse, and Toneczar Openhaus EQ - just to name a few. I would be very interested to hear from the metal-heads among you which you reckon to be the heaviest grindiest distortion pedal currently out there - I have several favourites already, but am still not sure that I’ve found my outright and ultimate Champion.

The GworX Kult in being 10 years old now (first released in 2012) is showing its age a little - in that several of its current contemporaries go more extreme - harder, tighter and with more extensive EQ-shaping. I still think it qualifies as a great candidate - while things have moved on quite a bit in the last 10 years. I probably paid a little over the odds in the end - when including the customs and imported charges - but I wasn’t about to let it slip though my fingers a further 4th time. And so I’m quietly satisfied that it’s finally in the reference collection now.

The seller told me to prepare for ’a tonal assault as that is probably as heavy a pedal ever made’ - which was surely true in 2010, while I think there are plenty who would dispute that today. It’s still a very worthwhile addition.

My preferred settings for the Kult are : Volume, Presence and Treble @ Max, Mids @ 4 o’c, Bass @ 3 o’c, EQ switch to the right, and Gain @ Max.

I use both Channels - as the Green is somewhat crisper and brighter versus the deeper darker nature of the Red - which is where I mostly operate - nice to be able to switch things up though of course.

If I were to make any improvements on it - and I believe every Extreme High Gain / Metal Pedal should be able to go to 11 - I would very slightly beef up the output - particularly for a 9V power supply - I also feel that the EQ controls could do with a more expansive taper - again - up to 11 really - so you can sharpen your preferred tones to the finest degrees.

As it is and all-in-all - this is still a pretty fantastic pedal - anyone else here have one?