Electro-Harmonix Black Finger Sustainer

Easy. volume, sustain, tone. Does require work to set it right.

I give a 7 because it is not pristine sound quality. Like all other EHX effects, you know when this thing is on. If you want the clarity of a Carl Martin compressor, this aint it. If you want a gooey compressor that you can feel and hear, this is it. tone knob goes from bassy to piercing without being harsh. Sustain knov goes from barely audible to squashed in a hurry.

yes and
yes
its 30 years old already.

As a thirty-year old design that was long ago discontinued, it is not plug and play. It's a touchy compressor that will gladly insult and enrage dilettantes, the feeble-minded and those with nasty Ritalin addictions. Patience brings out its finer qualities. Three knobs: volume, sustain and tone. Two "on" switches -- the customary foot button and a black Bakelite flick-job that must be turned on as well. Why? Who knows, but wouldn't life be boring if there wasn't idiosyncracy lurking in every day? Turn up the volume and sustain too far and it makes great noise -- pumping and hissing like something ready to blow -- although it never does. Clobber your tone with the "tone" knob -- anything from rational to dull and club-footed or shrill and intolerable. Will go from a nice gentle compression fairly rapidly into heavy squashing and even more quickly into loud unmusical hissing, pumping and glitching noise. Very useful, but not easy to use.

I used it for thirty years with a Fender Vibrolux and a variety of Hiwatts. It worked well with both but was extremely useful with the Hiwatts when it was necessary to squeeze more sustain out of fairly clean but overdriven sound at a level less than Hiwatt-ian. (In other
words, volume that kills everyone but the criminally rock and roll insane.) Curiously, it also compliments Rat boxes. Using it in gentle measures makes a Rat much more useable as a smooth distortion but with still an unmistakably brutish sound that used to be common in the Seventies but which is rarely heard today. Waxing heavy on the control knobs makes for a variety of really abusive sounds.
The first time you stomp the pedal into "on" it hesitates before giving you anything. A nice feature! As if something were charging up before letting go with your tone. After it has been stomped "on" once in the session, the lag goes away. Who knows why it's there? Remember what I said about idiosyncracy?

Utterly reliable. If you had a metal box of circuitry that lasted
thirty years, what would you think? You could throw it into a landfill
and if it didn't rust it would probably still work when you dug it up ten years later. Of course, this may be just the case with mine. Not
yours. Seems to be made of old battleship steel. Requires two nine-volt (that's "two" as in an eye-popping T-W-O!) batteries and eats them at a moderate but not accelerated rate. Opening the kit to replace them is reasonably but not overly trying. The edges of the inside of the battleship steel case are sharp and I have occasionally non-fatally nicked a finger while replacing T-W-O, that's "two," nine volt batteries.

Ha ha! Why would one need customer support? It never broke. And if you can't figure out how something works in thirty years time, you have bigger problems than can be addressed in this short consumer essay.

The Black Finger always did me good. And the name! Exquisite! I betcha no one would dare name something "The Black Finger" in this
politcally correct era. Colleagues have marvelled at the sheer stubborn durability of my Black Finger. They have even sometimes chittered and laughed in disrespect at the annoying glitchy tones that comes from it when the batteries run low and it starts eating itself. They have also admired the clear, thick sustain that educated use can wring from it. Certainly, it is a tool of utility in making old school rock brutality. While not indispensable, I have never heard anything quite like it since. It has always sounded old although it sounded quite new in 1970 or so. Guaranteed to sound old
now, always. That's good! Tough, brutish, potentially quite ugly sounding compressor that works well with tough, brutish, potentially quite ugly sounding big amplifiers and fuzztones. Not for milchtoasts, pantywaists and such. You should be an old, crabby guy
with a beard and a large bald spot for best results with ... The Black Finger.

very easy to use ,but i have 3 of them and they all sound different

i use a jeff beck strat into a silver face pro reverb,it does not like humbuckers(this makes the compressor pump)but for clean singing solos or funk rythm no other unit comes near (on a tele or strat)I think the secret to its sound is that it splits off the bass and only compresses the highs giving a crisp singing tone with no pumping

normal eh early crap, but it is 25 years old and with the odd repair(normally the pc track and the battery leads(2X 9v needed)all three of my units are going strong but make sure it sounds good with a strat(neck pickup) cos some dreadfull mods have been done on these units and wrong components put in

never tried but i spoke to the rep recently and asked him to get them to reissue this model

irreplacable ihave try'd loads of other makes

Very easy to use, three knobs, volume, sustain, tone, on/off slider

One of the best, but if you put more high in it it hisses, so I use it like a warm sounding compressed sustainer

Normal old EH crap

Dunno.....

It's crap but I like it more than my old Dynacomp.

Three knobs, nothing to it. Just turn them until the howling feedback stops, unless howling feedback is what you're looking for.

No matter what you plug into it you get this horrible buzzing and sucking sound, coupled with an ungodly amount of hiss. If you turn it up it emits monstrous feedback. Turning up the treble renders your tone unlistenably ear-piercing, but you can get sort of a good, thick sound with the treble rolled off. It will sort sustain a held note but as soon as you let go the buzzing and sucking start again. I used to use this with my first electric (a hollow-body Rickenbacker) to just make feedback and it worked great for that.

A friend of mine used to use it onstage with a country band, but he only stepped on it when he wanted to drown everybody else out.

Probably not.

If it were stolen, I would be very surprised, but I wouldn't comb the pawnshops looking for a replacement.