Geez, Who Needs a Pedalboard?
Let me confess to you all something in my behavior today that made no real sense at all. Something I think I've secretly known I was going to do for a while.
I never owned a Rat. I didn't have any experience with them until I started building them and kind of fell in love with the circuit, mostly because of the LM308 opamp being such an unruly, crappy opamp. I built my first one primarily because it was the only pedal in Jeff Beck's rig when I got to (briefly) meet him in 1989.
The Turbo version took me longer to discover. I can remember making fun of store displays for these when they came out. "Oh, it's like a Rat, but it's TURBOCHARGED!!!" Of course, the Turbo is the coolest Rat. I had no idea what the story was back then, but they have red LED clipping diodes and it just completely improves the circuit, IMO.
That said, I have a Retrosonic Distortion that's a Rat clone with three clipping options (including Turbo) and internal trimmers for bass and treble response that no Rat ever had. It's also true bypass. So superior to the real thing in pretty much every way. I also have at least two of my homemade clones that are pretty cool, including one with six clipping options and four compensation capacitor options.
Despite all that, I've been really wanting one of the old Turbo Rats from the 90's for a while now. I guess it's been like a sick fetish item for me. Gotta mess with a real one. Of course, I want to play it, not collect it. So I've been looking for the right candidate. There seem to be two kinds of these that pop up. There are the mint ones with the box and all assorted paperwork that cost enough to pay for a weekend in Vegas. Then there are the ones that look like they've been thrown at the wall nightly.
This one recently popped up, though. No box, but in remarkably decent shape and the price wasn't completely insane. Pot codes put it at 1991. So I looked at it every night for a week and then the monster whispering in my ear finally coerced me into buying it. Now I just have to tell my wife.
Geez, Who Needs a Pedalboard?
Let me confess to you all something in my behavior today that made no real sense at all. Something I think I've secretly known I was going to do for a while.
I never owned a Rat. I didn't have any experience with them until I started building them and kind of fell in love with the circuit, mostly because of the LM308 opamp being such an unruly, crappy opamp. I built my first one primarily because it was the only pedal in Jeff Beck's rig when I got to (briefly) meet him in 1989.
The Turbo version took me longer to discover. I can remember making fun of store displays for these when they came out. "Oh, it's like a Rat, but it's TURBOCHARGED!!!" Of course, the Turbo is the coolest Rat. I had no idea what the story was back then, but they have red LED clipping diodes and it just completely improves the circuit, IMO.
That said, I have a Retrosonic Distortion that's a Rat clone with three clipping options (including Turbo) and internal trimmers for bass and treble response that no Rat ever had. It's also true bypass. So superior to the real thing in pretty much every way. I also have at least two of my homemade clones that are pretty cool, including one with six clipping options and four compensation capacitor options.
Despite all that, I've been really wanting one of the old Turbo Rats from the 90's for a while now. I guess it's been like a sick fetish item for me. Gotta mess with a real one. Of course, I want to play it, not collect it. So I've been looking for the right candidate. There seem to be two kinds of these that pop up. There are the mint ones with the box and all assorted paperwork that cost enough to pay for a weekend in Vegas. Then there are the ones that look like they've been thrown at the wall nightly.
This one recently popped up, though. No box, but in remarkably decent shape and the price wasn't completely insane. Pot codes put it at 1991. So I looked at it every night for a week and then the monster whispering in my ear finally coerced me into buying it. Now I just have to tell my wife.