12 of the Best High Gain and Metal Pedals

I came to the Diezel amp sound via Saga lead guitarist Ian Crichton - who currently rocks a Diezel Herbert. Diezel's most celebrated amp though is the magnificent VH4, and in particular Channels 3 & 4 from that Amp. The original Diezel VH4 pedal had just the Channel 3 voicing with single footswitch. The newer VH4-2 adds Channel 4, a separate footswitch to change Channels, and independent Volume and Gain for the extra Channel. This is my current 'Extreme' distortion pedal of choice, but I've also long harboured a desire to add the Turkish-made Mind Abuse into the mix for occasional swap-out purposes.

This is THE Swiss Army Knife of Drive / Distortion pedals - with 6 dials and 4 different voicing toggles as such to give your pretty unprecedented tone-shaping ability in such a compact form-factor. Note that you really need a noise gate with this pedal as it has a fairly high noise floor, particularly on the higher gain stage - where I mostly like to play, and where I have the Gain set around the mid-way point / 12 for a sort of rich and fat hard-rock tone. This is one of my long-term favourite pedals, it sounds glorious and I would not swap it for anything. That said I would like to acquire a Keeley Filaments for occasional switching and experimenting etc. - I considered both those pedals head-to-head and sided with The Elements, although the Filaments is a really impressive pedal too.

This is obviously a very high gain fuzz pedal as such - but with lots of tone-shaping options, so you can tone down the fuzziness somewhat. A lot of players really love this pedal, but some can't get over the slight fuzz underpinning of most of the output tones. It's a well priced pedal for what you get, but relatively large. Yet regardless how decent a pedal it is, I don't see it competing for space with my existing Empress Heavy or MI Audio Megalith Delta. There are other more likely additions in this listing, but it's worthy of consideration particularly at its price level.

So I had the Wampler Dracarys in my chain for a while - and is does the Ola Englund chug / djent thing pretty well as expected, but does not really have a huge range of tones otherwise even with the tight / open voicing switch. So I started looking around for more versatile metal pedals, and came across the Empress Heavy via a variety of means - although mostly demos on YouTube. It did not take me long to set up my 2 channels - the left is a fat sounding heavy Marshall tone, while the right is a more tight, dark and percussive tone - both sound amazing, in fact the only complaint being when you cut the Middle frequencies you could really do with some extra volume on-tap. So that's the one thing I would change on this pedal - more volume really. My pedal-chain is pretty long and extensive, so another option is simply to recalibrate every pedal in the chain - which is significant work - as it is at the moment it actually works pretty well - a really great and properly versatile metal pedal.

I've already covered this pedal in my Marshall pedals overview - this is kind of the heaviest Marshall tone I make use of - tight and percussive and pretty high gain too. It's actually the least gainy of my heavy artillery, coming in before the Empress Heavy, Megalith Delta and Diezel VH4-2. I don't really change the voicing much here - it's typical set to tight and percussive really. Lots of metalheads really like this pedal and I can totally see why.

When I acquired the Dr Scientist Elements, I mostly compared it to the Filaments as both are pretty similar in setup. Sure they have slightly different tone-shaping elements, but both have full 3-band EQs and further dials and toggle switches to boost certain key frequencies. Overall I kind of prefer the tone of The Elements, but both are excellent really, and for a while I could have gone either way. In any case the Filaments is definitely on my wishlist, and will be acquired eventually.

I have quite a lot of amp tones in my chain, but nothing covering the MESA/Boogie Rectifier style distortion - Double, Triple or otherwise. The Throttle Box EQ does its best to give you the Boogie Rectifier experience in a pedal, and features both high and low gain channels (all distortions really though), along with that famous 5-band EQ, and a smart Mid-Cut Dial and Boost switch. I'm kind of torn between this one and the Wampler Triple Wreck at the moment - which is Brian's homage to those amps. For reasons of size etc. I'm currently leaning towards the Wampler, but I would kinda sorta quite like both. I feel that that this MESA/Boogie pedal could be slimmed down somewhat too! It's a really versatile and great sounding metal pedal though.

This is my second heaviest pedal in line with how I set the gain - with the Diezel the most extreme, although I could easily reverse those - it just depends how you dial it in. This is one of my most recently acquired pedals, and I love its range of tones and clever tone-shaping options - particularly the EQ Shift toggle and Contour dial which are somewhat unusual. This produces enormously fat metal tones with real oomph in the low end frequencies. It's not quite as versatile as the Empress Heavy, but I would say it's a touch gainier overall. I also have the Super Crunch Box from MI Audio - both pedals are brilliant.

I have a fairly lengthy wishlist of Mooer pedals - yes I'm still a fan of the mini pedals too, and the 2 heaviest distortion pedals Mooer does is the Rage Machine, and the Blade Metal Distortion, with my preference lying with the first mentioned, although the Blade is pretty decent too. These do not quite have the harmonic richness of the other pedals listed here, but then their circuitboards are half the size - these are both pretty decent pedals, and I will likely get me a Rage Machine eventually some day.

I've mentioned this superb Turkish-made pedal before, with its brutal distortion tones within 3 voicing settings - Classic | Vintage | Modern, usual 3-band EQ, and usual Volume and Gain dials. Sounds amazing right across the range of voicings and gain levels. It's been on my wishlist for a while and I've loved every demo I've heard. I fully intend to get this for occasional swap-out for the Extreme distortion slot currently and mostly occupied by the Diezel VH4-2 - which has the advantage of 2 Channels.

I mentioned above that I had nothing yet in my chain to represent the high gain MESA/Boogie Rectifier sound, and the obvious way to get to that is via the proprietary Throttle Box EQ above, or Brian Wampler's own take on the same sound. Each approach has its pros and cons, but I think overall I prefer what the Triple Wreck delivers - in a significantly more compact package. I like both, and may well get both eventually for proper swapping around, yet as it stands the Triple Wreck will be added first.