Description

YES. YES! THE HORN OF HELM HAMMERHAND SHALL SOUND IN THE DEEP ONE LAST TIME!!

So it begins.

One of the most Iconic scenes from The Two Towers is the battle of The Hornburg, or Helms Deep. It is pure rage, survival, pain and noise. Just like this pedal that stands before you!

The Hornburg is, not a mistake, but something that should not be. A bit like the Uruk-hai. Its takes 2 mammoth circuits and blends them into one. A creation I thought would fail at the first hurdle, but it didn’t.

The input signal is split 3 ways after the buffer, one heads to the gain stage of our overdrive, a supped up BlackIce with Drive control, one sits parallel to this to a modded tall fonted muff circuit consisting of its first 3 stages and sustain/fuzz control. These two signals then come together on the Effect-mix pot. Our third signal then runs parallel too these and forms our clean blend. This allows us to add any needed clean signal (you won’t need it, I run it fully wet haha) if you wish after the gain, but before the EQ. This then goes into our EQ which consists of a master tone and mids control. The mids offering a +/- 5db boost or cut at around 700hz. From the EQ it goes to our make up gain stage and output buffer before our true-bypass switching.

This has been road tested for a little while now, including Naomi from the Guitar Nerds podcast and Empire State Bastard who used it live with the band on a few dates including Download, Hellfest and Glasto! (How cool is that?!)

“Yo yo! It’s on the board    it sounds sick as fuckkk!! Really loud like you said! I did actually use the pedal for some sections yesterday!! (Download Festival date!) As you said it’s shuuuper hot so just gotta figure out some ways to temper it in the chain… but it sounds sick af!!” This was invaluable feedback as before it was creating too much noise and the circuit was redesigned slightly to tame the output and floor noise.

This is a gain pedal, aimed at bassists that want a gain pedal. The tone control in conjunction with the mids, can take the pedal from full phat to modern clank if thats what you want. The Fuzz level goes from fuzz, to more fuzz and equally the gain on the OD goes from gain to more gain. The only clean from this is on the blend, and who needs one of those?!

Another super awesome couple of gents have been Dan Higgins (Darla Jade and session bassist) and Andy Gilmore (Hundred Reasons and Raging Speedhorn) have been providing tester feedback.

Dan likes it – “I’m loving it man! I think it’s maybe a little extreme for using with Darla, but I could definitely see myself using one with any number of more rocky artists. The mid control & the Black Ice in there make it really cut through any mix!”

I put this together as a bit of an experiment. I love a big muff and wanted to have one with a bit more versatility to it that other versions out there don’t. Yeah a blend and mids control has been done but adding an extra gain stage in parallel on a mix pot brings something different to the mirage of other muff style pedals.

Please remember, these pedals are made to order and there may be a 6 week lead time on getting the pedals manufactured. I am a 1 man machine and usually build in batches of 5-10 but will endeavour to get your pedal built as fast as I can.

We are now onto V1.2 of the Hornburg. The Blend has been reworked slightly to be less ‘bitey’ and the tone control has a new set of values, only small tweaks but improvements none the less.