Nashville’s Mythos Pedals has served up a super tasty exclusive for its Music City neighbours Carter Vintage Guitars that combines two classic pedalboard sounds in one housing and promises sweet sounds no matter where you set the dials. It’s called the Extra Hot, and it looks like a box of fried chicken.
Of course, there are chickenhead knobs on top, a fire engine red knob for “Flavor” on the Take Out side of the pedal that is of course a gain control. As with all things Mythos, this is a beautifully put together pedal.
File this one under objects of desire, and one of the few guitar effects pedals to have officially made us hungry (Caroline Guitar Company’s Hawaiian Pizza fuzz pedal being another, despite the questionable suggestion that pineapple is a good/acceptable pie topping).
Unlike some twofer drives, there is no order switch. On this, the Take Out circuit comes first, goes into the Dine In circuit, plug in, turn the dials to taste and play.
Both circuits should be familiar. Mythos fans might recognise some of the tonal characteristics of the Take Out side, having been appropriated but modded from the Air Lane Drive/210 Double Drive pedals. Everybody should recognise the Dine In side, as this is an ODR-1 style overdrive, which means it is presenting as one of the quintessential sounds of Nashville.
As Zach Broyles, Mythos founder, says in the demo video, you just plug in a Fender Telecaster or a Stratocaster into one of those and that hot session sound is there. The Dine In circuit was modified from the now out-of-production Erlking overdrive pedal.
Level adjusts the output volume of the Dine In side, with Heat setting the gain. And there are two mini-dials under the chickenhead knobs for fine-tuning the sound, with Cut acting as a tone control, and Size controlling the low-end. You can make it as big and overpoweringly bass-heavy as you like, or skinny and wiry.
The Take Out side also has a mini-dial for Sauce, which operates as a volume control. Under the hood this circuit is a hard-clipping, single-transistor circuit, and despite its simple drive it can yield a lot of sounds, from boost to drive to those sorts of quasi-fuzz tones that hard-clipping drives are so good at.
Each side has its own footswitch. Jacks are mounted on the top of the enclosure. If you recognise this pedal then it’s because a version of this existed way back when. Broyles, who is a former employee at Carter Vintage Guitars, made an exclusive called the Hot Chicken for them, and a design that was quite similar.
But as he explains, in the interim period, Seymour Duncan have launched the Hot Chicken electric guitar pickup set – another Nashville inspired piece of gear – and so he took the opportunity to revise the circuit and update the recipe. We tweaked it to make it sound more like how it should sound now,” he says. “My ears have evolved since I started making that circuit.”
These, sadly, might be hard to find, and are available exclusively via Carter Vintage Guitars. But that just sounds like a good excuse to drop in on the vintage guitar emporium if you are in the area. See Mythos Pedals and Carter Vintage Guitars for more details.
