Solar Guitars Chug Pedal 2-stars Reviews

One trick pony, and not really that good at it

The pedal does what is says on the tin, and only that. And even, not that good honestly.

Pros:

- it really has loads of gain, and the low/high gain filter is really good if you want to have a focused distortion sound

- integrated noise gate is nice and necessary for the huge amount of gain this pedal provides

- the 5 eq controls are nice to further shape your distorted sound

Cons:

- the knobs are just too tight and unreadable, it's really hard to move a knob without moving the adjacent ones too

- there's no lower gain settings, it doesn't go from 0 to 11, but from 10 to 11 if you get the gist

- the noise gate control is useless from 0% to 50%, it just doesn't do anything

- the high/presence eq section auto-oscillates, which means that if you put these knobs at more than 20% you'll hear a horrible high-pitched squeal, now I understand why in every video review I've seen of it they always say to keep the presence and highs at 0% to "tame the high frequencies"

All in all, I've tried to get a useful tone out of this for a bit with no success. I really wanted to believe in this pedal, the idea of having basically a 3-in-1 pedal (noise gate, distortion, eq) was really nice, but I'd rather have 3 separate pedals with more quality and control than 1 that does all three things mediocrely.