Review: Danelectro Fabtone Distortion

Some things just don't seem to go together. Bananas and Marmite for example – a friend of mine at primary school used to eat Marmite-smeared bananas so that he would violently throw up and get to avoid school (Of course, thanks to the marvels of modern technology, any schoolboy can now easily achieve the same effect by performing a Google image search for Chad Kroeger, and no bananas get hurt). Chalk and cheese. Simon Cowell and likeability.

However, some things that seem like they shouldn't go together end up working very well. Take Shane McGowan. His face looks like it lost an argument with a cluster bomb, he drinks enough to qualify as a member of the Politburo and has a voice like a zombie gargling battery acid. Yet somehow he is a professional vocalist, and a very good one. All the ingredients are wrong, and yet the final product is somehow right. I have a friend who is a skinny, ginger, nerdy-voiced, buck-toothed computer programmer called Kevin, who is also, somehow, the coolest man in the universe, with hordes of girls fighting over him. Everyone who meets him agrees on his coolness, yet they are all mystified as to its origin. Sometimes things are more than the sum of their parts.

What I have in front of me here is a heavy metal distortion pedal made by Danelectro. Read that sentence again. This is Danelectro, a company that produces an EQ pedal called “Fish and Chips” and builds guitars that Aristotle would call Retro. I'm pretty sure that their entire board of directors consists of former Happy Days cast members. Now the whole “50's Diner” vibe is great if you're playing echoey surf rock in the background of a Tarantino film, but this pedal purports to produce a high-gain modern metal wall of distortion, whilst looking like a spare part for a Cadillac. Now this really shouldn't work, but as we know, that doesn't necessarily mean anything. So, are we talking Shane McGowan or Chad Kroeger?

First up, this is a big, chunky, heavy pedal that looks like it could survive the climactic gunfight in any good Tarantino film. Everything is controlled by big, chunky, good ol' American hunks o' metal with no mussin' aroun'. If Jimmy Hoffa had a pedal, this would be his pedal.

OK, let's plug it in and...

JESUS H. CHRIST!!!

OK, now I've scraped the last of my entrails off the wall, apologised to the neighbours and convinced the local constabulary that I'm not testing nuclear weapons in my bedroom, allow me to share my first two conclusions about this pedal:

1 – This pedal turns itself on when you plug it in.
2 – This is very possibly the loudest pedal in the known universe.

We can only pray that Kim Jong Il is not developing a pedal such as this. The big round metal button in the middle of the Fabtone unleashes more destructive power than the big red button in the Oval Office. The sheer quantity of gain this pedal puts out almost defies belief. That heavy, chunky metal case is evidently not there to protect the pedal's innards – it's to prevent whatever demonically-enhanced circuitry, possibly a portal to a dimension of pure noise, a dimension where the controls on the amps start at 11, resides within from escaping and possessing your family pets.

OK, so it's clearly very, very loud. Does it sound any good? Well, the unhelpful answer at this stage is that it depends.

The first thing it depends on is how you set the EQ on the pedal. The Fabtone has to have the most unbalanced EQ controls of anything ever, especially the treble control. Anything over about ¼ is unacceptably glassy and harsh, and anything over about ½ surely violates the Geneva Convention. Seriously, if you are ever captured by some third-world dictator and placed in one of his horrible torture camps, it's not the thumbscrews or the gouging knives you should be looking out for, it's a Danelectro Fabtone with the treble control all the way up. Then you know you're in real trouble. The bass control, on the other hand, needs to be set at at least ½, preferably ¾, before you start getting any real bottom end. There's also a third control, called, this being a Dano pedal, “Fab”. According to the manual, this does something about sustaining the distortion or something like that (it's not a distortion control – that seems to be set to infinity by default). All I could work out is that it seemed to make something already face-kickingly loud slightly louder. So, me being me, I set it as high as it would go and left it there.

The other thing the sound depends on, critically, is your amp. There seems to be no logic or reason to what amps this sounds good through and what it sounds bad through. As far as valve amps go, through a Marshall JCM800 stack it was superb. Through a Mesa Dual Rectifier it was horrible, but through a Roland Jazz Chorus it was great again. Almost any large transistor-amp will produce a horrible, tinny buzzing monstrosity of a tone, but my dinky little Peavey keyboard amp creates a great sound. Through my Marshall AVT50 hybrid combo it sounds fantastic, but through my near-identical VS100 combo it sounds horrible. All I'd say is try before you buy, with the exact model of amp you will be putting it through.

But when you finally hit the sweet spot with the right EQ settings and the right amp, this is an amazing-sounding pedal, producing a deep, rich, saturated tone reminiscent of an overcooked Mesa triple-rec, and with a detuned or 7-string guitar, epic, sweeping soundscapes reminiscent of later Deftones albums can be yours without massively expensive equipment (or a spectacular cannabis habit). Turn the treble up (very, very slightly, you don't want to frighten the horses) and add a little reverb and you're in Gary Moore/EVH territory, the super-saturated gain giving you massive sustain and huge harmonics, rewarding shred techniques and massive chords alike. Cut the bass a bit and you're into early Metallica thrash sounds.

It's not all good news sonically, though. This is one hell of a noisy pedal. Even with the guitar's volume at zero, the sound from your amp is not so much hiss as the sound of Niagra Falls in a thunderstorm. In a rehearsal studio situation, it's loud enough to drown out conversation. Should you be foolish enough to actually turn your guitar up, even with the strings muted, the hiss becomes a shrieking wail of uncontrollable feedback – the only way to achieve short, stabby chords is to time your chords with pressing the big round button o' doom with your foot so that the pedal is only on when the strings are vibrating. This is quite hard. A noise gate helps, but not a lot. On another note, unsurprisingly for a pedal with so much ear-smashing power, it eats batteries for breakfast, so get a power supply.

So, underneath all the cutesy 50's styling, this is a raging, rabid monster of a pedal that you don't so much play as desperately try to keep under control. It's (occasionally) wonderful sound is spoiled to a big extent by its raw, uncontrollable power and its infuriating habit of turning itself on when you plug a cable into its input (this pedal really needs a separate on/off switch. And a health warning. And a 2-mile exclusion zone). So, ironically for a company that makes pedals called Grilled Cheese, Corned Beef and BLT, they've overcooked this one a bit.

Verdict: 3/5

Boom shake the room.