If you are a big fan of fuzz pedals, and you haven’t checked out Center Street Electronics yet, you’re missing out. Plain and simple. You might have seen our review recently on the God Hates Fuzz pedal of theirs, and today we’ve got a completely different animal to try and tame: the Drone Station Fuzz.
This little black beauty is a 2-stage gain pedal that can do a fairly broad range of tones, going from a pretty killer overdrive to a ballsy fuzz, basically with the click of a footswitch. The Volume and Tone controls are applied to whichever channel you happen to be in, which makes things a little less complicated, in my book. There’s a cool knob in the middle that controls the Voltage that’s being supplied to the pedal, which really makes the Drone Station fun to mess around with. When fully cranked, this Voltage knob makes the pedal sound normal, but start dialing it back, and you get all sorts of breakup and glitch-y sounds emanating from your amp. Mix these with the 2 separate Gain stage controls, and you’re in for a wild ride.
I dig the dual Gain stages as well, as you can go from a nice overdrive tone to a massive fuzz wall in a half second. Dialing these 2 stages in independently allows you to really decide what sounds from this pedal are important in your signal path, and how you can best utilize them in a functional and sonically pleasurable way. Plus, you mix in that Voltage decimator and this thing takes off into video game fuzz territory with a quickness.
My only wish about this pedal is that there was an LED or two on the left side, so you could easily tell which gain channel was currently activated. Not that you can’t tell by the sound, it would just be nice to be able to switch between one or the other before turning the pedal on, depending on what tune you were currently playing on stage. That’s just a small nitpick, though – the Drone Station is a beast, and an awesome 2-In-1. The cats over at Center Street Electronics are making incredible gear, go check them out NOW.
Submitted by Mike B, Website
Demo Rock pedalboard by West Coast Pedalboard
