Cardinal Black guitarist Chris Buck has joined forces with ThorpyFX for a signature overdrive pedal, which takes a very literal approach to ‘amp in a box’ pedals.
The Electric Lightning is a dual-sided overdrive pedal and footswitchable boost, with a built-in tube that heats up under the hood for a very amp-like feel, as per Buck's overdrive dreams.
A few fans may have spotted the pedal lurking on Buck's pedalboard for some time now, as the guitarist has been road-testing his signature creation. However, the fact that ThorpyFX's founder Adrian Thorpe had snuck a preamp tube into its bowels comes as a very pleasant surprise.
“From the very first discussions that I had with Adrian, it became abundantly clear that both of us wanted to do something a little bit different,” Buck recalls. “Not only to differentiate it from his previous work and current line of pedals but also something a little different from most of the pedals currently available.
“I've put it through every nightmare scenario it could have been exposed to, and it's been faultless,” he adds.
The Electric Lightning might be a pedal, but it does everything it can to sound and behave like an amp, presenting players with two footswitchable channels and an amp-like control layout.
There's an overdrive on the left-hand side of the pedal – which Buck says “probably does get slightly in the realms of distortion” – and a boost on the right-hand side.
The ‘amp’ itself is tweakable via knobs for Volume, Treble, Mids, Gain, and Bass, while its Boost has a separate control for Boost and Lows to fatten up, or thin out, the extra punch it provides.
Adrian Thorpe’s description of the pedal is “a valve overdrive with a very high headroom booster” and he believes “there's something special about valves in pedals. The way the drive responds to your guitar, your playing is more dynamic, it responds to your volume control better. It just feels alive.”
Of the overdrive's simple three-band EQ, Thorpe adds that “a little goes a long way.”
On Cardinal Black's debut album, January Came Close, Buck was chasing a tone he described as Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon meets Ray LaMontagne, with the Electric Lightning built to handle those tones on stage.
Buck says it has also proven “a sweetener on every track on the [forthcoming] new album... whether that's pushing a clean amp or [via] full-bore rocking out moments on the overdrive side.”
The pedal costs £429 (approx $535) and is available via ThorpyFX.
