Blackhawk Amplifiers Uruk-hai V5 High Gain Distortion is a perfect flavour mix of Drive and Fuzz

Blackhawk’s Uruk-hai famously combines two of its finest circuits within the one enclosure - where the Valkyrie Saturated OpAmp Drive is cascaded into the Valhalla Sludgy Fuzz. You actually have separate gain controls for each side of the circuit, supported by common / universal Volume, Treble and Mids knobs, along with a fairly unique gate.

Controls - Volume, Valhalla Gain, Treble, Valkyrie Gain, Gate, Mids.

The Gate almost works like a bias in some respects as the texture changes frequently across the sweep of that knob. For me the gate sounds best at around 8 o’c - that’s where you get the best texture and harmonics - you really need to move the dial quite finely to hit that sweet-spot - a little like a safe-cracker!

Apart from the one concession, all the other knobs are fully cranked. In fact Brooks recommends you start everything at noon - bar the Volume - which should be maxed at all times!

In fact that’s the only niggle really in that you could do with a little more volume on-tap. The volume is fine with everything pretty much maxed - but when you try to do lower blends of the 2 x Gains or EQ you never get the output quite loud enough.

Brooks has made several attempts to raise the volume further - but each time those changes have impacted negatively on the glorious texture of the pedal. The challenge has always been to keep that beautifully richly textured distortion while simply raising its output level - thus far a workable solution has not presented itself!

The pedal sounds amazing with everything maxed out and the Gate at around 8 o’c as mentioned - note that the gate plays into the output challenge too - as there are portions along the sweep of the gate which clip and choke the output level too.

Obviously the clipping process of Drive cascaded into Fuzz naturally results in some volume drop - as is the challenge with a lot of distortion pedals - in fact several of my very high gain pedals have output issues because of the degree and nature of their clipping.

One solution for me is to run the All-Pedal Slamurai into the Uruk-hai - which largely preserves the core flavour but gives it a really decent extra boost. A clean boost after the distortion also can help to a degree - but you don’t entirely retain the full rich quality of the core texture.

I still think it’s a really worthy High Gain Distortion - and it is quite distinct from my other Blackhawk pedals - it’s not quite as brutal though as say the Balrog or Fellbeast!

Note also that there are 2 versions of the Uruk-hai V5 - more traditional Distortion via LM308 core opamp chip (Black Edition), and more Fuzzy / Fuzzstortion via the UA741 opamp chip (Blackened Edition).

Brooks and I decided that I would have more palm-muting chuggy fun with the LM308 variant - which is slightly tighter in its nature. I’m still tempted to get the UA741 edition too for its killer low-end grind!

Both editions are available for order right now on the Blackhawk Amps Webstore - for $220 - get yours now!