Leprechaun FX collaborates with Dr Scientist for the beautifully textured Paddy Whacker High Gain Rock 'N Roll Mini Distortion Pedal

I’m a huge fan of richly textured gain pedals - and have a particularly liking for super potent firecracker mini pedals with huge sounds! - for which this Paddy Whacker Distortion certainly seems to fit the bill. The distortion circuit is designed by Ryan and Neil at Dr Scientist Sounds. The Enclosures are individually hand painted and assembled by Patrick, in-house, at Leprechaun FX in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

I love those ’Landgraff’ style swirly paint jobs - while Leprechaun note that you can get some idiosyncrasies and slightly uneven finishing for this particular dipped paint process. The finish is also not as robust as UV Printing or powder coating - so these pedals need to be handled with certain care if you want to preserve their looks - or else you need to be more relaxed about them becoming somewhat relic’d along the way.

I’ve acquired a number of pocket rockets along the way - and this sounds exactly up my street - with that rich almost fuzzy texture at times.

Controls - Gain, Volume, Contour (Tone), Wet/Dry Mix.

The Paddy Whacker High Gain Rock ’N Roll Distortion is available from the Leprechaun FX Webstore right now for $199 CAD - which equates to circa $150 USD. I will definitely be getting one of these!

The 4-knob control topology is really very straightforward  - your classic 3-knob gain pedal topology plus a clean blend. And judging from the demo video - these seem to come in different colours - as that version is mostly blue, while the pictured reference version is mostly green!

Ryan at Dr Scientist still makes one of my all-time favourite fuzes - the Frazz Dazzler, and in part the richly textured sound of the Paddy Whacker brings back fond memories of that!

Leprechaun FX is mostly a music store - while they do have a compact and bijoux range of their own pedals - including this highly appealing Paddy Whacker. This month is pretty well spoken for already - so I will be making the acquisition sometime in April most likely!