Subdecay Studios Blackstar

Subdecay Studios Blackstar is a High gain overdrive with muscle and depth. The angry little brother of The Liquid Sunshine, The Blackstar makes your amp sound bigger without turning your tone in to a murky muddy mess. Like The Liquid Sunshine it uses a cascaded jFET design for graceful breakup and retains the sound of your guitar with a dynamic response that rivals your favorite tube amplifiers. The new With Girth version has been redesigned for improved low gain tones, less noise, and it won’t fuzz out when the gain is cranked.

Many guitar overdrives simply fall short in implementation. Often the real problems are overlooked. Most operate with a single high gain harsh clipping stage and deal with all problems created by cutting way too much bass, and let you deal with the top end with a simple low pass filter style tone control. Even worse, many designs alter the mid-range drastically. This is great when demoed at your local guitar shop, but once you take it home and the volume goes up, the fake and empty sound becomes more and more obvious. The more gain in an overdrive, the more important the frequency response. High gain sounds are almost created more by frequency response and volume than simply adding more gain.

The Blackstar’s uniquely tailored tone control cuts through the thickest mix, but can be rolled back a bit for a less aggressive sound and sparser arrangements. The tone control affects the entire frequency spectrum, not just high end.

The girth knob adds cabinet resonance to your amplifier. This is simply not an option on other guitar pedals. The fact is amps vary as much (if not more) by bass response as they do treble. The difference is the bass response can often squash everything else to the point where a treble control is simply inadequate. If you visualize a note it looks a bit like a wave traveling across the surface of water. The wave you see is primarily made of the fundamental tone of that note. The harmonics, which are really the character of your tone take a ride on top. If your amp cant handle all of the energy of the fundamental note all harmonics hit a ceiling and are quickly obliterated. The ability of an amplifier to handle lower frequencies is determined by not only design, but the guitar you are using, speakers, cabinet size, and overall volume. A quick adjustment of the girth control lets all the tone come through while you control how much air moves.

Who is this pedal for?

In recent years a lot of affordable, road worthy tube amp combos have come to market. Usually with adequate clean sounds, but often the overdriven tones fall short, especially as the volume goes up. Then there’s the dilemma of older single channel amps. The Blackstar with Girth is suited equally well for these amplifier types. Palm muted riffs, pinch harmonics, full chords and room filling solos all sound great while you use The Blackstar. The Blackstar loves getting pushed by other pedals too. Boost the signal and it only enhances what it already does.

 <manual>