Funny Little Boxes' latest album-inspired pedal is the beautifully textured beefy high gain Alice in Chains style DIRT Distortion
As I mentioned in my recent Kempton Park London International Guitar Show report - this DIRT Distortion was originally supposed to be the immediate follow-up to the very similarly styled 1991 Pearl Jam sensation.
The DIRT is a 3-way collaboration between Andy Ilgunas of Funny Little Boxes, Matt Webster of Let’s Play All - who’s also done the next level demo and sounds samples below. And on this occasion SoundLad Liverpool’s Marc Dunn was also involved.
As is sometimes the case - the last 5 or 10% usually makes all the difference for these kinds of projects, and for some reason it wasn’t sounding quite 100% right just yet for Andy - which allowed the Queens of the Stone Age style Skeleton Key to sneak up on the insider and overtake it - while the DIRT was stuck in development limbo. Until Andy figured out a smart feedback trick - which finally gave him the full spectrum of what the vision had been - to cover the DIRT album in particular, but a wider range of Alice In Chains tones from across their many releases too.
What is markedly different with these projects is that the starting and ending point is entirely the recorded tones of that inspiration album - that’s always what the aim is - to replicate the ’sound’ not component-model or circuit-replicate the original amp or pedal - but rather the overall recorded gain tonality - so it’s a matter of matching components to that task and range - those are the ingredients that made both the 1991 and The Skeleton Key so popular - and this 3rd one in that series is probably the strongest and most instant one yet. Note that this circuit fairly needs the volume to be cranked - and that most of the key action is in the final quarter turn.
These individual sound design projects would not hit quite so hard without Matt’s superb demos and sound-sample videos - where he exactingly matches and dials in the pedal to precisely sonically reproduce those well-loved album tones. And the nature of this pedal is very expansive indeed, using a TL072 OpAmp at its core - for that versatile beefy high gain distortion. Matt not only covers Alice in Chains, but key tracks by other artists - Audioslave - Cochise, Metallica - Ride The Lightning, Pantera - Walk, RATM - Killing In The Name Of, and Slipknot - Duality, along with a variety of recorded sounds by Faith No More, Silverchair, Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden, Steve Vai, and TOOL.
The main event here is of course Alice In Chains, where besides DIRT, there is coverage of tracks from pretty much most of those album releases, bar The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here, as follows :
- DIRT [1992]
- Them Bones - Rhythm & Solo [track 1]
- Would? [track 13]
- Dam That River [track 2]
- Rooster [track 6]
- Sickman [track 5]
- Down In A Hole - Rhythm & Solo [track 4]
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- FACELIFT (debut) [1990]
- Man In A Box [track 2]
- Bleed The Freak [track 4]
- It Ain’t Like That [track 7]
- We Die Young [track 1]
And then individual tracks - Sludge Factory - from Alice In Chains / Tripod, Died - from Music Bank, Check My Brain - from Black Gives Way To Blue, and Drone - from Rainier Fog.
I feel this is a great way to do pedals, and these collaborations really seem to work - the combined might of the participants is pretty impressive for sure.
Controls - Dirt (Gain), Volume, Bass, Mids, Treble.
So there's plenty of range on most of these dials, but this pedal gives me the same challenges as its 1991 predecessor - in the volume department. This is the only pedal on my board where even when I have its volume at max when I kick it in, it drops my core output volume to below unity. It's the reason why I have the Strymon Sunset permanently in an adjoining slot - as that has bee instrumental in rehabilitating and rescuing so many low output gain pedals in the chain - fuzzes and distortions in particular. I have a number of overdrive and distortion pedals currently on the board - and the only pedal seemingly that has this weakness is the DIRT - where it was evidently inherited from its predecessor. I'd forgotten just how low the output range is. Everything else about this pedal is fabulous - and you can see from Matt's Demo - that the variations in Gain and EQ take you into a much broader territory.
The Strymon Sunset helps this pedal stay viable within my chain - but it is a notable flaw for me, and one which prevents me from giving it top tier status. In most other ways it totally fulfils its mission and sounds really great with it, but the low output volume thing is definitely an issue and should ideally be resolved for future iterations.
I encountered a similar low output issue with the VS Audio Jangle Master recently - but the volume drop for the DIRT is more pronounced!
In terms of the volume thing - the formula seems to be the same as for the previous 2 in the series - albeit the DIRT - with its 3-Band EQ is much closer to the 1991, and the Skeleton Key therefore possibly the odd one out in some ways - but all sell for the same brilliant price of just £99 on the Funny Little Boxes Webstore.
I still feel that most will really love this pedal - while Clean Pedal Platform advocates will need to adjust their setup and bring to bear a secondary post / clean output boost! In every other way acquiring this pedal is pretty much a no-brainer.
It has to be noted that pedals gel variously with different players, and it's often a rig / compatibility thing in terms of how easy it can be to accommodate a certain effect. Despite its single flaw - the DIRT Distortion is still very much a killer versatile distortion pedal which totally has Alice In Chains covered!
My favourite / most harmonically rich settings are Dirt @ 3 o'c, Volume @ Max (and then some!), Bass @ Max, Mids @ 10 o'c, Treble @ Noon.
Demos
