DAN AGOSTO: Hi. Welcome to Gearwire.Com. We're taking a look at the Danelectro French Toast Octave Distortion today. It's one of their mini pedals that's become popular in recent years. Let's take a look at the pedal.

All right. So I have to mention the documentation that comes with it includes registration and warranty card, and also some suggested sound settings, and this is a list for different types of pedals. Here we see one for the Corned Beef, one for the DJ-3 BLT, and let's see. Over here we see a 7 for the French Toast or up here actually. So there's one for that, but there's, if you have the other pedals, it's a good thing to have.

So, taking a look at the pedal, we got standard inputs and outputs, 1/4", also have a AC adapter input for, well it says 9 volts, a little scratched off there. These come with this little protector over this, this plastic protector. It's supposed to be removable but it is pretty hard to get off. I haven't been able to get off this one myself, but it's there, kind of makes it hard to get into the knobs especially if you have larger fingers, but you can still get in there, and since the knobs are kind of small, it protects them from getting damaged on the floor.

There is a battery already in this. To get at that, you just unscrew this little nut here, this little screw here, and the back end would come off and you'll be able to put a battery in there but it comes with a battery already installed. And that's the Danelectro French Toast Octave Distortion out of the box.

All right, we're back and we're taking a look at the Danelectro French Toast Octave Distortion. I got it all plugged in. I'm playing a Fender American Standard Telecaster into a Marshall JCM2000 half stack, and that's mic'ed up with a Shure SM57. So let's see what kind of tone we're getting with the pedal in bypass mode.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH DANELECTRO FRENCH TOAST OCTAVE DISTORTION IN BYPASS MODE]

All right. So we'll turn the pedal on. As you can hear, you can already see it adds a lot of volume right off the bat. We have the volume knob down a little bit and both of the knobs are straight up.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH DANELECTRO FRENCH TOAST OCTAVE DISTORTION IN ENGAGE MODE]

So you can see with the distortion knob just halfway up, we're getting a lot of distortion, a lot of fuzz. We can probably call this type of distortion a fuzz. All right, let's give it just a little more volume and turn down this distortion pedal, or distortion knob. Let's see what happens down here.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH DANELECTRO FRENCH TOAST OCTAVE DISTORTION IN ENGAGE MODE WITH SPECIFIED SETTINGS]

A little bit more.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH DANELECTRO FRENCH TOAST OCTAVE DISTORTION IN ENGAGE MODE WITH SPECIFIED SETTINGS]

All right, so you can get some lower distortion stuff but it's really coloring the sound even with the distortion knob all the way down. Very compressed, almost stops sounding like a guitar in certain ways but definitely useable sound.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH DANELECTRO FRENCH TOAST OCTAVE DISTORTION IN ENGAGE MODE WITH SPECIFIED SETTINGS]

That's with the distortion knob all the way down. Let's see what it does higher up and see if we can do anything more than it did, changes as you tyurn it past center.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH DANELECTRO FRENCH TOAST OCTAVE DISTORTION IN ENGAGE MODE WITH SPECIFIED SETTINGS]

So you can see it's just very compressed. There's a certain quality about it that almost makes it sound like an electronic instrument. I think that has to do with the amount of compression it's applying to the signal.

Let's check what this EQ knob does. It's actually just a tone knob. We turn it counterclockwise. It's going to give you sort of give you more bassy tone.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH DANELECTRO FRENCH TOAST OCTAVE DISTORTION IN ENGAGE MODE WITH SPECIFIED SETTINGS]

If you turn it up, we're going to get a more biting tone with lots more treble.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH DANELECTRO FRENCH TOAST OCTAVE DISTORTION IN ENGAGE MODE WITH SPECIFIED SETTINGS]

All right, there's another option on this pedal. It's not ut a plain fuzz pedal. There's this octave switch. Let's see what that does.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH DANELECTRO FRENCH TOAST OCTAVE DISTORTION IN ENGAGE MODE WITH OCTAVE SWITCH ON]

So what that is doing is adding another octave up but it's also distorting it as well so it gets sort of crazy sounds with the EQ up as this follows. Let's see what it does if we turn down the EQ a bit.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH DANELECTRO FRENCH TOAST OCTAVE DISTORTION IN ENGAGE MODE WITH SPECIFIED SETTINGS]

Give me more distortion.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH DANELECTRO FRENCH TOAST OCTAVE DISTORTION IN ENGAGE MODE WITH SPECIFIED SETTINGS]

Try it down.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH DANELECTRO FRENCH TOAST OCTAVE DISTORTION IN ENGAGE MODE WITH VARIOUS SETTINGS]

So let's see how that sounds versus the normal mode.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH DANELECTRO FRENCH TOAST OCTAVE DISTORTION IN ENGAGE MODE, COMPARING NORMAL MODE AND OCTAVE MODE]

All right, it's not an incredibly pronounced octave effect, but it does definitely change the characteristics of your sound. So that's the Danelectro French Toast Octave Distortion Pedal. Thanks for checking it out at Gearwire.Com.