NPKD

[Dave_11]

New pedal kit day! This is my second pedal kit.

I bought this Solodallas Storm clone kit from a German website for a total of around $60 with a drilled box and knobs. AionFX in the US sells the board, but they don't offer a kit yet. Everything seemed fairly decent quality, except for the bottom cover of the box, around the outside, where it meets with the top was a little rough. No parts were missing and they included plenty of wire.

I named my pedal "The Riff Raff" and printed out some labels. They were printed on "clear" sticky paper, but it is 20 years old and not so clear any more. The labels look a lot clearer in person though.

I've wanted a Storm for a while, but was hesitant to spend $230 on one. After playing around with this for a couple of nights I'm glad I didn't, because I'm having a hard time dialing in a good tone with this clone. I thought I would really like this pedal, but it just doesn't have that crispy crunchy tone I thought it would. It has a thicker, meatier tone that gets kind of woolly with the volume and pregain up. The limiter is a bit of a mystery to me. I read what it does on the SD website, but I'm having a hard time figuring out just how to use it effectively. At least all of this dialing in will keep me busy for the next week or so.

 

[Dogs of Doom]

well, there's no guarantee, that this actually sounds & responds the same as the SoloDallas™ Storm...

I tried some of the SD stuff, & it sounds really good. I tried it through Fil's JTM45 though...

 

[Dogs of Doom]

if it works like the actual pedal, the limiter works in tandem w/ the gain knob

 

[Dave_11]

Thanks. Yeah, I'm thinking this pedal may sound a lot better with a plexi or jmp type amp. I'm running it through my Ori20. Or it could be my ear. I'm going through a mid-boost phase in my tone quest, and this sound is different.

Another thing is they keep changing the knob names on this pedal. It used to be Power, Storm, and Snap. Now it's Gain, Boost and Limiter. The Gale calls them Volume, Pregain, and Threshold, with the top two knobs seemingly reversed in function compared with what you posted above: Gain = Volume, and Boost = Pregain?

 

[Dave_11]

After playing through my new Goldbox Distortion (MXR Distortion+) for a couple of days, I went back to this pedal and wow now it sounds great! I guess my brain got too used to a super mid-boosted sound from an SD-1 into a mid-boosted EQ pedal for the past month, and the Storm clone sound was a shock to my system. Apparently the wooly Goldbox tone reset my brain (plus the fact that I turned the bass way down on the amp). Anyway, I'm glad it sounds so good to me now and don't want to put anyone else off from trying a Storm type clone.

 

[V-man]

I have a Tonebender. You would think HB through a 1959 would be the cat’s ass, i run mine through and it sounds good, but it’s like the knobs are near-useless. The exact descriptors you used with your initial expectations and what you heard seemed to apply the same way to my experience.

Strangely, the bender seems more usable with my 2203 where I can run it much cleaner (as is and on lo sensitivity) where it can do that “thick, meaty wooly“ tone but can be dialed more and thinned out on the 2203, with more of a raspy nasal FZ1 Quality. More range, mote tones, more better.

different amps, different performance. But returning, to the 1959, I concede the sound I get is great, just seems like something is wrong with no “real ability to dial” (but that fucking amp has 2 modes: ”off“ and “RR/Jimmy Page live”). it may be that attenuating with a different unit might change things, or maybe not.