Artec VPL-1

Its a true bypass volume pedal thats about the same size as my vox wah, mono input, a bypass jack (for tuners and such) and volume pedal jack. its not that hard to figure out but what made me scratch my head was the LED that I expected to stay on like a boss pedal, blinks 5 times then turns off, then I saw the decal that it???s a low battery light,
The minimum and maximum parameters are a really cool feature, I was able to set the minimum (heel down) to a light breakup and maximum (toe down) to full out and instead of clicking on a boost was able to ease into some sweet overdrive.
Couldn???t hear any coloration of my tone, took it apart to see a minimalistic design and a really cool pot that uses magnets, haven???t seen anything like that till now

i put this volume pedal at the very beginning of my signal chain and took out a Whirlwind AB/Y pedal that i used as a mute pedal at the end of the chain since i can just use this pedal to kill my signal,

one of the things that I didn???t like about this pedal is that first off its all metal and to stop from the click click sound of the pedal hitting itself, Artec put rubber on the front and the back, well on the heel back position it would not go dead silent, in fact it wasn???t very loud but you could still hear the guitar.

So I peeled off the rubber and put a thin piece of the soft side of Velcro on the bottom just so I could go a little bit farther and that seemed to solve the problem.

Then one day I had my compressor, booster, and overdrive on and when I had the heel back after I ???fixed??? it I could faintly hear my guitar still (past the white noise). I???ve never owned an ernie ball so I don???t know if this is common thing. But when they???re off I can???t hear anything.

Solid metal pedal with a hard plastic foot grip, four small rubber feet are sort of glued on the bottom but dont stay there very long, i just peeled the last two off after i lost the other ones which made it a whole lot easier Velcroing it onto my homemade board.

After i want to say after a month the pedal started to get sqeeky when i would rock it but some WD-40 fixed it no problem.

Never had any serious problems with it after about 6 months of 4 performances a week.
So i never had to deal with them.

Its cheaper than a used ernie ball, editable volume parameters which is a fun feature, if it were lost or stolen i would by another one, i really was planning on bitting the bullet when i bought a pedal from a company i've never heard of offline that was based out of the far east but i dont regret it at all.