OWEN O'MALLEY: Hi. Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. I'm Owen O'Malley. I don't know if you've heard but Danelectro came out with a whole series of "Cool Cat" pedals at this previous Summer NAMM that we were looking at and listening to. They're okay I guess. I am more of a fan of the original Danelectro pedals. Okay, not the original Danelectro pedals but the ones that came out about 10 years ago. This guy is the Fab Tone. The Fab Tone is just a ridiculous distortion. I got it for super cheap. In fact, you can see right on the side here. I got it for $34.99. Yeah, so it's got pretty basic controls here, ust a simple in/out, a little 9-volt in right there, you've got your volume which controls the overall volume, two-band EQ (bass and treble), and the Fab control which is how much fabulous it is, or the distortion, and then you've got your little on/off switch right here. I don't think they're true bypass.

They come in these really just hardy die cast casings so they're like totally indestructible and then kind of stupidly married with plastic input jacks, so the plastic input jacks are the first --

[OWEN O'MALLEY TRIGGERS SIGNAL BUZZ ACCIDENTALLY]

Oh! Did you hear that?

[OWEN O'MALLEY TRIGGERS SIGNAL BUZZ ON PURPOSE]

Yeah. There you go.

[OWEN O'MALLEY TRIGGERS SIGNAL BUZZ ON PURPOSE]

Those little plastic input jacks. They're the first things to go on these babies. But they sound pretty awesome. Let's check it out.

So there's four basic controls on this thing. We've got our output volume. We're just going to leave that where it is. We've got our two-band EQ (bass and treble), and here's our Fab dial. Fab is your distortion level. It's ridiculously intense. There's like there's no real off; even if you have it all the way down, it's still more intense than most pedals. Let's just listen to the clean signal here first.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH DANELECTRO FAB TONE BYPASSED]

And now let's engage it.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH DANELECTRO FAB TONE ENGAGED]

Now, Fab here is kind of hard to tell because it's been a little beat up, but you can see that this is on like a third of the way up. Let's turn it all the way off or all the way down.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH DANELECTRO FAB TONE ENGAGED AND FAB KNOB ALL THE WAY DOWN]

That's with the effect all the way off. I mean all the way up it's just like the feedback is just you can't -- it's totally uncontrollable. Yeah, there we go. So let's -- right about here is sort of where like our useable level is. Here's our bass EQ right here. All the way down:

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH DANELECTRO FAB TONE ENGAGED AND BASS EQ ALL THE WAY DOWN]

It almost sounds like one of those cigarette box distortions -- I mean the cigarette box amps.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH DANELECTRO FAB TONE ENGAGED AND BASS EQ KNOB ALL THE WAY DOWN]

And now we have the bass knob up:

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH DANELECTRO FAB TONE ENGAGED AND BASS EQ KNOB ALL THE WAY UP]

Some crazy EQ too.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH DANELECTRO FAB TONE ENGAGED AND BASS EQ KNOB ALL THE WAY UP]

It's actually this EQ control right here that makes it such a good bass fuzz pedal. Maybe we'll take a listen to that later.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH DANELECTRO FAB TONE ENGAGED WHILE ADJUSTING EQ SETTINGS]

Okay. Let's just bring it to about 12 o'clock. Here's our treble control. It's pretty far down right now.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH DANELECTRO FAB TONE ENGAGED WHILE ADJUSTING TREBLE EQ KNOB]

When it gets too high, it's almost just disgusting, but it's voiced in a pretty smart way where it really sort of affects your pick attack, so if we have it off all the way.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH DANELECTRO FAB TONE ENGAGED AND TREBLE EQ KNOB ALL THE WAY DOWN]

And now we'll bring it up.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH DANELECTRO FAB TONE ENGAGED AND TREBLE EQ KNOB ALL THE WAY UP]

So if you really like that sort of, you know, speed metal pick attack, a really aggressive attack sound, this kind of dials in exactly that frequency.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH DANELECTRO FAB TONE ENGAGED AND TREBLE EQ KNOB IN VARIOUS SETTINGS]

And when it's off, you know you got a little bit more of a vintage-sounding distortion.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH DANELECTRO FAB TONE ENGAGED AND TREBLE EQ KNOB ALL THE WAY DOWN]

But you know, it's not the most versatile sounding pedal. I mean there's -- this is off. This is --

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH DANELECTRO FAB TONE ENGAGED AND FAB KNOB ALL THE WAY DOWN]

That's the -- Yeah anyway, so but I mean it sounds huge and it sounds pretty cool for the one sort of like specific thing that it does. That was the Danelectro Fab Tone from circa '97, '98. They don't make them anymore...

[OWEN O'MALLEY TRIGGERS FEEDBACK USING DANELECTRO FAB TONE]

...but they probably should, and with metal jacks this time guys.

[OWEN O'MALLEY TRIGGERS SIGNAL BUZZ ON PURPOSE]

All right. Anyway, thanks for watching Gearwire.Com. This has been Owen O'Malley. Take care.