Every guitarist under 50 has likely owned one or two of these MT-2's -- a promising stack-in-a-box -- only to quickly find, despite the extensive EQ, that 1) full chords sound terrible, even with gain on zero, 2) the pedal has no dynamics, and 3) when trying to notch-out the nasally, cocked-wah tone, the sound disappears in the mix, aka the "angry-bee-in-a-can" buzz.

The way guitarists used to overcome the high-gain problems (fogettabout using it for overdriven, full chords) was to use a another dirt pedal (ideally a 2nd MT-2) to cut all the bass and treble before hitting the next pedal's gain stage. Then, with dynamics and bandwidth thus limited, one could bring back the tone by cranking the bass and treble on the 2nd dirt pedal. This gave a useable rock & metal tone, just really. . . compressed. Well, in toggle-position 1, led-clipping, Monte Allums achieves that fierce tone PLUS more dynamic crunch AND "pinched harmonics are enhanced 4X", as his official pedal-mod site claims.

After listening to one of Monte's modded MT-2s, to me, toggle-position 2 sounds like a Rat pushing an MT-2, while position 3 sounds like a tube screamer pushing a Rat. All three positions are good for overdriven full chords (you know, CSN's Wooden Ships, Floyd's Brain Damage and just about anything Hendrix); but once again, position 1, I think, sounds best. If only he would offer pre-modded MT-2's with two TB switches to access two separate gains and volumes, using dual-concentric knobs for the gains and output volumes. That would rate a 9. As is now -- especially considering some noise issues in position 1 -- I rate the Allums'-Tri-Gain-modded MT-2 an 8 out of 10. Which is still an improvement. Stock, I only give the MT-2 a 6 out of 10.