Pete Cornish Gilmourish Pedal Sound-Alikes and Near Match Alternatives

I've mentioned before how the Pete Cornish G-2 was supposedly sort of voiced after Jimmy Page's 1970's Super Lead Plexi tones, while the circuit actually started out as a fairly conventional Big Muff variant - most likely some derivative of Ram's Head. Pete then significantly honed and evolved the circuit - initially by adding 4 high quality NOS Germanium Clipping Diodes into the mix, but then tweaking various further elements of the circuit to make it quite distinct from anything else. The output of which is often likened to a ProCo Rat or sort of Plexi tone with very evident Big Muff underpinnings - particularly in the sustain department. I myself tend to call this variety Plexi-Muff based on how I feel it combines and best represents those two key characteristics. Each of the 3 alternatives is a slightly different take on the G-2 - with Vick Audio's V-2 and Top Tone's Drivegate DG-2 leaning more towards the Muff aspect of the G-2, while the Buffalo FX Evolution has slightly more of that Plexi / Rat flavour. Of the 3 alternatives the Brazilian Top Tone Drivegate DG-2 (R$1,280/$230/£176) is the most hard to come by - there have been a few Reverb.com listings over the years but not many. Buffalo FX is currently on a sort of enforced hiatus - meaning that we need to treat the Evolution (€219/£219) as being somewhat discontinued too, while the Vick Audio V-2 ($144) is generally more widely available. I personally own both Evolution and V-2 and really like each in its own way, while the Evolution is slightly more versatile because of its additional Contour knob, where plenty others will likely though prefer the slightly more Muff-like nature of the V-2. I would of course still like to own a G-2 some day, while my likelihood of getting my hands on a Drivegate DG-2 seems somewhat more remote. I feel I'm pretty well covered by the alternatives here and don't necessarily see an urgent need for me to try to pin down the original - we'll see what happens in time.

I've said before that if I only owned one Pete Cornish pedal - then this CC-1 would likely be it. With its formidably tuned 3-Band Active EQ, and beautifully balanced 2-stage soft-clipping overdrive with magical high end sparkle! When I first came across it I spent some significant time marvelling at its particular frequency profile and highly dynamic output and tried very hard to find near-match equivalents - which turns out I was quite unable to satisfy them. The CC-1 has a quite distinctive signature frequency profile and timbre that I just wasn't hearing anywhere else - until I came across Roman Belonozhko's Multifaceted Shnobel Tone Daily Driver - which doesn't overlap exactly, but has a really quite similar core tone signature - with those delightfully sparkling / chimey higher frequencies. In fact the Daily Driver has something of a Muff character to it too in its long-tail sustain, while it cleans up beautifully via your guitar's volume dial. I can't exactly put my finger on it - but there's really something magical too in what the Daily Driver delivers - it does not quite match the full 3-Band Active EQ of the CC-1 - but its combination of Active Baxandall 2-Band EQ and High-Cut 3-way switch allows it to cover a lot of similar territory. I will most likely still acquire the CC-1 at some stage in the future - while there is something equally appealing to me about the Daily Driver ($279)

As mentioned previously on this site, this supposedly started off as Pete's fairly authentic and straight-laced take on one of David Gilmour's V3 Red & Black variety Ram's Head Muffs - before Pete then applied his usual circuit-tweaker magic to deliver a fairly distinctive voicing. This has all the usual Big Muff characteristics you might expect for this genre with slightly clearer note separation and definition. At £603 it's also just marginally the most expensive Peter Cornish variety. I personally have well over 50 varieties of Big Muff - including numerous versions of the Ram's Head circuits. In fact I own each of the 5 excellent alternatives here - with the Buffalo FX M-1 (£239) the most recently added to my collection. The others here are a special 5-knob edition of the Basic Audio TriRam ($220), the Skreddy P19 ($214/£199), Vick Audio '73 Ram's Head ($144/£121) and Wren and Cuff Custom Shop Small Foot Caprid Fuzz ($218 as pictured) - all exceptional in their own right. I could also have added the Expresso FX Tup Fuzz which another exceptional extended-range Ram's Head variant, and my Toneczar OTP Fuzz ($399) - which is more of a general all-rounder BMP style fuzz, but particularly adept at Ram's Head style tones. I've obviously been collecting these for a while, and before I was even properly familiar with the Pete Cornish P-1. The irony here is that I've spent a few times over the price-tag of the P-1 in my quest for the best of this particular genre. Each of these delivers its own subtly nuanced take on the genre and while there is considerable overlap here, each also has some of its own distinguishing characteristics like say in note clarity and separation. I really love each and every one of these and on different days am drawn to one variety over another - while I very much doubt you would be anything but delighted with any of these. The P-1 is still probably something I would quite like to acquire eventually, but it's not something I really need, and it's not quite as distinctly unique for me as say the CC-1 Overdrive.

Pete Cornish's second variety of Precision Fuzz is a more refined and smoother derivation of BPM Fuzz - closely aligned to the Civil War Muff variety - another of David Gilmour's favourite varieties. Both the P-1 and P-2 have the same 3 - Volume, Tone and Sustain controls - while my alternatives here have 4-5 controls. They include the Vick Audio 1861 ($144/£121), Buffalo FX Patriot MKII (€199/£199), Mojo Hand FX Colossus ($159/£159), Stomp Under Foot Civil Unrest ($189/£189), and Wren and Cuff Custom Shop Small Foot Box of War ($222 as pictured). Unlike the P-1 above where I own all the featured alternatives - here I have just the 1861, Patriot MKII and Colossus (albeit the green edition). You will know from my Stomp Under Foot roundup that I have a number of those on my target list - including the Civil Unrest, and I also aim to pin down a Custom Shop Box of War eventually too. Generally my preference for Big Muffs tends to be Triangle then Ram's Head and then Russian varieties - while here for instance I prefer the Buffalo FX Patriot MKII over its M-1 sibling, yet I prefer the Vick Audio '73 over its 1861 sibling - these are marginal and nuanced though as I'm a huge fan of each and every variety - and in fact currently have all 5 Vick Audio Tau Series BMP variants in my chain for comparison - from the smoothest Black Russian through Ram's Head varieties and onto the slightly gainier Triangle style. I generally prefer the Pete Cornish P-1 over the P-2 but both are really decent - while I would always seek out the former first.

This final stage of the journey is an interesting one - as for the longest time I wasn't exactly clear on the provenance of the NG-3 and what sort of fuzz circuit it was based on. I kind of presumed it was a super-high-gain muff variant as that's mostly where Pete Cornish tends to operate. It was even an early catalyst for me to get the Toneczar OTP ($399) BMP style fuzz - as I thought with it's extended tone-shaping and gain-staging it would most likely get into similar territory. Yet I soon realised how wrong my original impressions were - and that the NG-3 was much more like a very tightly focused high gain Super Fuzz style variant - or nearest soundalike. Which meant that the nearest category match equivalent was the Toneczar Vault Fuzz ($399) already in my collection - I now of course have both Toneczar varieties. Yet it was the original one that is more similar to the NG-3 - and in fact can deliver an even wider variety of tones than the superbly capable NG-3. Of course like most of these others I still really want the original one, but it would likely play third fiddle to the CC-1 and P-1 varieties in terms of my overall preferences.