Today’s guest review comes to us from Rob H. – you can find him on Instagram (@studio.rh), Twitter (@Rob_Hildreth) or on his website (Studio RH).

Magnetic Effects are a London (UK) based boutique pedal manufacturer. All of the effects are designed and built by Christian Livingstone, who also happens to be the riff monster from NZ garage rockers The Datsuns. You only need to listen to his guitar work to realise this guy knows how to filthy things up on the guitar and these pedals are an excellent by product of that. Not to mention they just look amazing too, the artwork is awesome!

The Double Feature (retails at £125) is a Russian germanium based transistor fuzz box with a twist! Stomping on the left switch kicks in a filthy, raunchy and quite a unique voiced fuzz. I’m a self-confessed fuzz addict and have worked my through a lot of fuzz boxes over the years, this one really stands out. It’s probably the most reliable and stable germanium based fuzz I’ve played on. I’m playing on my MIJ Tele custom, loaded with a set of Bareknuckle Piledrivers, through a Fender tube amp on the clean channel. With the Double Feature’s gain knob set low at about 8 o’clock, you can dial in a thick and growling overdrive that loves chords and sustains leads beautifully. Moving the gain to 12 o’clock opens up a lovely thick fuzz that blew my favourite NYC Big Muff away. This sound has been likened to a cross between a Big Muff and a Tonebender, I’ve owned both of these and I can confirm it’s quite accurate, maybe leaning more towards the Tonebender sound in my opinion. Cranking the pedal’s gain all the way up just goes into fuzz meltdown in a great way. Drop tune the guitar and riff away.

The fuzz on this pedal is so versatile, I managed to dial in everything from 60’s garage psych sounds, to full on stoner rock riffing and shoegazing heaven. The pedal also reacts really nice to picking dynamics and rolling off the volume knob on the guitar can mellow things down slightly. The volume knob on the DF does exactly what it should and the tone knob is nice and responsive.

Moving to the right switch is SO much fun. This second feature of the pedal is a parked wah sound and is controlled by the sweep frequency control knob. My favourite spot is with the fuzz on 3 o’clock and the sweep set to around 9 o’clock, this produces a rich and tamed Harmonic Percolator(esque) sound. Turning the sweep knob past 12 makes you want to jam out some of Mick Ronson’s parked wah fuzz licks from The Spiders From Mars era.

On the website it states that “The fuzz has a high input impedance and low output impedance which makes it play nice with buffered signal chains, wireless units and switching devices”. I played around with the positioning of the pedal on my board, putting it before and after a buffer, and found the statement to be pretty accurate. I prefer the pedal first in my chain before my buffer, it just sounds slightly fatter here and fits my tone preferences.

I’m really impressed with the sound and build quality of these dirt boxes and the service is great too. Check out Mike B’s review of the Magnetic Effects White Atom here for another example of how great these pedals are. Don’t just take my word for it though, get over to Magnetic Effects and try one out for yourself. My next purchase will be the ME Satellite Overdrive, so hopefully there will be a review of that coming soon!

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