ProCo BRAT

How hard can 3 knobs be? - yeah that's right - it's on or off & when it's on it distorts and when it's off ....hey surprise surprise it's off!

One trick pony. 2 knobs at 1pm and a volume setting where you need it...off you go

Seems ok, don't really get the comments about the battery compartment - it does it's job fine. Plastic & cheap but hey you want a rolls? pay a rolls price!

no need.

Pretty good for not much money BUT I need to supplement it with a blues driver or something else for a bit of variety - NOTE: this is a one trick pony!

pretty simple to use and get good sounds. this has same chip as the proco rat and turbo rat, but less appeal and lower priced.

i am running a fender strat with alnico 5, single coil pickups overwound to 9.2, 9.5 & 9.8k wrapped with 43 gauge wire, as opposed to 42 gauge, which would be rather muddy and midheavy at this resistance. i am running this brat into a 1966 gibson ga-5t amp with 2 el-84's in push-pull. pretty quiet, unless the treble is turned up too far on the amp. i am running the rat through a guyatone mc-3 chorus that i bypass alot of the time. the brat gives me all the distortion i need when warm crunch isn't enough. i would rather have this than a boutique pedal that underperforms for the buck.

you can buy a roadkill distortion, and it's the same thing, just different packaging. both are highly underrated bargain pedals. no slop like dod, digitech, or the cheesy, cheaply made, save a fraction of a cent with cheaper resistors and caps, as seen in the ibanez 7 line.

Very easy to use. You will find the "one trick pony" setting fairly easily (tone and distortion knobs a bit past half way).

I've played this pedal through a number of amps (tube and solid state) with a humbucker equipped guitar.

Here's the deal. Firstly, if you have a solid state amp, this pedal is likely to produce an ugly squeal which is totally unuseable.

With the distortion turned all the way up, this pedal sounds very thin and screeching. This sound cannot be tolerated unless you are half deaf.

The only usable setting is the "one-trick pony" I mentioned before. This setting can actually give you a marshall-esqe tone, which is quite good, although not as good as a real overdriven tube marshall. The main reason being is that it sounds a little muffled and not as natural.

This pedal can also come in handy to boost an already overdriven tube amp for a solo. Harmonics can really jump out.

Another reviewer commented that this pedal sounds "generic". That is quite valid.

I laughed when I saw high ratings in this department.

Yes, the footswitch is a piece of plastic crap, and yes, it doesn't work sometimes when you try to engage the pedal, which is obviously a big problem.

Changing the battery in the plastic battery holder is a bitch and the holder is prone to breaking.

N/A

I sold this pedal a while ago. After reading these reviews, I thought I'd set the record straight.

With a tube amp, this pedal could come in handy. Solid-state, forget it.

You'd want one in immaculate condition if you were to get one.

3 knobs, tone, volume, distort, footswitch, on, off...what else do you need? simple but it works perfectly and is very veeeeerrry iiizy! no manual, no editing patches, no digital banks, no leds and so...for that it's a 5 and for the ease of use a 10

this pedal is so loud! i've had a marshall shredmaster, danelectro fab tone, ibanez tubescreamer 5, 9 and 808, jen fuzz and the proco rat2 and i sold them all and kept only the brat, not just because it's looks so fuckin' cool but the sound is everything what i need, hey, it's only a distortion pedal but i like it! i like the sound, now with the wah...imagine mike from pearl jam playin' the evenflow solo and that's it...start that old analog delay and whooa, isn't that jimi hendrix groovin' with neil young on red house? the sound quality works for me!

it's like titanic...if you jump on the plastic footswitch, it will probably broke and sink, but if u use it humanly it will work forever and sail, sail, sail...good job proco!

i have no clue, in fact i don't need customer support...

well, i'm in love with this pedal, it does what it does and i like what it does, at first i thought this is a shit pedal, because i wanted something else(more and more fuzz, more) and it was 'cheap' but then i discovered, what a cool stompbox this is! boost, sustain, feedback, screaming high tones, 'wise' low tones, great for all kinds of rock, heavy blues...it looks like a fuckin' toy but it's a serious pro-level stompbox...so patience makes perfect...if you want a pedal playing guitar for you, with sterile metallic sound and making you and your music a robot then don't buy this pedal...if you want a trusty servant then check the brat, it'll serve and help you creating maybe some fukken great music you know? and for protection call 911 or other xxx, bye...

First off, this is just my impressions of a used one I tried that was priced $25.
I was interested in the Rats because Jeff Beck's main pedal is a Rat (no, he's not an endorser) but the prices on these things are pretty high compared to other brands.
Obviously it's a simple pedal. But it's not so easy to get a good sound out of it. Even when you set everything middleish, the best sound you are going to get is...well, ratty, tattered, funky. If other rats are like this, just goes to show that most of Beck's tone is in the fingers. Ended up getting a Boss DS-1 for $30, smooth sounding and and no overtly bad settings (but you can't get ratty, tattered, funky, etc...maybe with some mods).
Oh, and I ended up having to do some battery switching in this thing. Easily the worst battery arrangement ever in any pedal, must be experienced to be believed. The battery is surrounded in a plastic holder that is near impossible to force into position in a square hole in the bottom of the pedal, especially since in the one I was trying the wires were curving just so they wouldn't get out of the way meaning it's not easy avoiding shearing the wires going to the batter harness. I probably struggled with that thing for five minutes and never quite got it right.

Ratty, tattered, funky, mostly unusable settings and the usable is kind of a one trick thing and you adjust your playing to it as opposed to it being responsive to your playing. Substantially substandard overall compared to anything else I've tried.

Fellow musicians will not be impressed by your death struggle with your battery holder. Or the sound, really.

Hopefully other Rats are much better.

3 knobs, volume, tone, and distortion. I especially like what it says when you remove the metal face plate. It reads:follow your dreams. The input jack says give and the output says take. I love it!!

I have sampled, tried, and owned a lott of distortion pedals including a vintage Ibanez tubescreamer, an Ibanez Ts5 with the 808 specs added,a Ts7 that was hot-rodded, a boss ds-1, and a cheap rocktek ds to name a few. This pedal has a lot of gain and when the pedal has been engaged the signal gets jacked up. It is very good for blues, mind you that it wont give a good grunge or metal tone but it kicks ass with a tube amp, or any amp with a spring reverb.

I depend on it whenever Im up for a little bluessy sound or if I need a signifigant sound gain I'll turn the distortion down and use it with another distortion pedal. The signal never has crackled or been dropped when I do that. I"m not afraid of gigging w/o a backup.

I asked the company if they could fix the plastic piece when I dropped it and the screws stripped. they told me to send it on in and they would fix it and pay shipping. It doesn't get any better.

Granted I play a lot of Metallica, and Pantera, this pedal really works for blues and early 80's van halen, but dont expect to get a crunchy tone with a lot of scooped mids and out-of-the-state-of-mind lows. I use another pedal for the metal stuff. I've been playing for 15 yrs now and I'd much rather not tell you all of the things I use because its not the guitar that makes the music, nor the pedal, it's the sheer will to make it and the soul that provides it.

Quite easy to get a nice sound, just requires a bit of experimentation. The words under the knobs are handy also.

The sound quality is very solid, I have heard better though. It sounds much better through an effects loop however, and works very well with digital reverb. The actual sound quality can vary depending on much distortion and tone you use. Lots of tone and medium distortion gives you a very highp itched sound and would probably good for heavy metal solos. but it you turn the tone down to about 11 o'clock and the distrotion up you get a very deep and grunge sort of sound, which would be good for heavy rhythm sounds.
The bad things are that if you use the distortion at a very high level you cant hear what your playing at ALL. It just makes a constantly distorted fuzzy sort of sound and just sounds like a wall of noise, however when used at lower levels the sound carries on for a long time and sounds great.
So I'd have to say this pedal is great when used at medium levels, but when you turn distortion over about 70% you wont be able to tell what your playing.

I've had absoloutely no problems apart from once when it make a beeping sound when i tried to hook it up to my amp, hasn't happened since.
Its a very tough pedal and would probably be great for gigging with especailly if you like to beat your pedals up.
The battery cover is tough but also seems impossible to open and the footswitch sometimes has to be hit a couple of times till you get a sound (it also seems a bit weak)

There was just a warranty thing on the box, but it only seemed to be for US residents which isnt much help to me, but if it was completly broke I'd get my local guitar shop to fix it, as there extremly helpfull (www.guitargalleries.co.uk)

I play alot of different types of music, from the legendary Smashing Pumpkins, to stuff like incubus, iron maiden, red hot chili peppers and many other bands. It doesn't really suit a smashing pumpkin sort of sound, but goes well with incubus, iron maiden and various rock and metal stuff.
I have the pedal for about 3 months and use it with a
Fernandes Les Paul Junior and a soundking 20 watt amp with digital reverb and overdrive on it. It sounds decent through this, but when i tried it through a 60 watt fender amp it sounded sweet. I quite like this pedal and I mainly got it because it sounded alot better than my amps overdrive. I've grown to like it much more over the past month and can't wait to use it with my small stone which im getting for christmas and hopefully a new amp next year!
If it were stolen I would kick the person who stole it in the balls and bitchslap their parents. I would probably not get another one as I think I payed a bit to much for mine, I'll probably trade this in sometime and get a EH big muff to get a more pumpkin like sound.

Overall it's a nice distortion pedal, and definately worth getting if you can pick it up for under #30.

as everyone has said, pedals dont get much easier

i have used this pedal with my music man bass and it gives a very musical distortion. yet when i hooked it up with my guitarists setup it sounded even better. he had the volume on the pedal high and the amp high and no feedback. he has dual humbucker reverse dinky by jackson (with open coils so you can imagine) we play indie and acid rock, this didnt give us a signatuire indie or hendrix-esque sound but we wanted to sound different. his amp is a crate 212 gfx with tube sim circuitry and i use a peavy tko115 (using a old tube amp as the preamp(this is because the peavy preamp sucks) hard modification to make but well worth the effort by the way)

so far so good

it is good with us...

Three knobs? im shure i could think of someone who could'nt operate it but that would be a waste of time.

A very harsh distortion. dont buy if you are looking for a tube sound. i play a barrage of guitars including a westbury, dearmond and a bc rich and sent through a randal rg100h or a butcher all tube it sounds pretty good for a high gain pedal.

looks pretty strong. swith isnt quite as heavy duty as i would like it to be.

never needed them

a good high gain solid state pedal.

easy to get a good sound out of it, I mean....three knobs, if you can't figure something out of this thing let me come over and beat the shit out of you because your a retard!

I use a danelectro hoodad through a fender deluxe 90, with a crybaby wah, and a marshall jackhammer. I needed a distortion that would boost....which is what I got this for. Turning the volume and tone all the way up and the gain on the brat a little is a great boost to your sound. What this pedal really reminds me of is a flimsy pink/purple harsh tube screamer. as a main distortion I don't know how people could get a grunge sound or a nin sound out of it....it's not harsh at all......though it does make a really good keith richards sound, and that's about as accurate as anyone could get. look at it this way, with how this thing looks it should sound like a danelectro fabtone, which is too much distortion! and the fabtone should sound like this.... I give it a 9 for false advertiseing and when you turn it on and off....theirs a weird beep

mmmmmmm with how cheap it is, I don't think it would be too reliable, I mean the knob is plastic, it has no led indicator to tell you if it's on and yes the plasic switcher doesn't always turn it on when you hit it...the pedal is shady, but the pots look really good, I question the wireing job....I rewired it just to be on the safe side....I wouldn't beat it up like I would a boss pedal

Like I said, it's a cheaper and more harsh tube screamer, and I don't really use it as a distortion unit, just a boost. for the money, it's at least fun to play with in your room. I collect distortion boxes and love playing different ones.....but I used to use a big muff for a boost with the marshall jackhammer....and all I could really get was too thick of distortion to sound good...and lots and lots of noise (like two buffalo mating) "rouuuughhhhhhhghhhhh roughghghh!" you get the point right? But it's a very clean sounding pedal.....it looks retarded and isn't extremely well built...but it's worth a try