NPD - VFE Pale Horse

[somanytoys]

I ordered a VFE Pale Horse pedal, for Peter's final run to liquidate the remainder of his inventory a few months ago. There were only certain ones available that he had parts & enclosures remaining, and he had to wait until school was out to be able to build them.

The Pale Horse appears to have started out as a sort of TS-9 variant, but really seems to have become its own thing, because he had 2 other pedals that are much more tube screamer types (The Scream where you can change the op amp, and The Ice Scream, which seems like a beefier version of a TS-9). I already have a TS-9, so I went with the Pale Horse.

I just received it the other day, and played with it at low volumes for a couple of evenings. I really like it.

The comp knob chooses between distortions, using an op-amp for a cleaner tone, an asymmetrical distortion or a mosfet distortion. You can choose one alone, or sweep between 2 (the op amp & asymmetrical, or the op amp & mosfet). The other knobs are gain, level, tone (shelving that can be changed with an internal trimpot), bass and treble controls, with another internal trimpot that will change the pedal's impedance.

In the middle position (12:00), with the gain down (like pretty much all the way), the op-amp gives a nice clean boost, pretty fat, but it will distort quickly when the gain knob is turned up at all. Probably very cool for someone going for an "edge of breakup"sound (or more) with a very clean amp, as they turn the gain up a bit.

The asymmetrical side is really nice, and seems extremely diverse, being able to sweep the comp knob to blend that setting in with the op amp, and using the gain knob in conjunction with the various settings. I'm not really sure if it's a Dumble type of distortion or what, exactly (seems similar to the Zenkudo in green mode), but it's nice, I played on that setting a lot of the time.

The mosfet side operates similarly, and I like it a lot as well. It's got more growl and isn't a sweet, but it's more reactive to your playing, and the sound is definitely more full, a lot more Marshall-esque. It kind of reminded me of my Blackstone on the red setting.

I'm going to try to pull out my White Horse compressor this weekend, and see what this thing sounds like pushing the White Horse, and use a little more amp volume.