Rothwell Audio Products Hellbender Overdrive Pedal

This is one of the first pedals from Rothwell Audio, (there's a more extreme distortion pedal and a clean boost pedal as well). Rothwell also make high-end hi-fi gear so the level of audio engineering should be good. The Hellbender is an overdrive pedal that's designed to give a range of tones starting at the more subtle end of the scale, without overwhelming the underlying guitar/amp tone, and with good response to picking dynamics. It's a simple, three-control design and that makes it easy to use: Volume, Gain and Tone rotary knobs. That, and the on/off switch and 9V DC input is all there is. Getting a good sound of it is straightforward, which is not always the case with some effects. Volume is capable of producing a big lift in sound level, even with the gain set to zero. It's not quite a clean boost set like that, but near enough, just a bit fatter. Tone takes you from darker to the left, round to brighter with slightly scooped mids around 1K to the right. Gain winds up the dirt. There's a brief but informative instruction sheet that tells you all you need to know about operating it.

It's quiet in operation and has a true bypass so it doesn't affect your tone when switched off. I bought the pedal as a tone-shaping tool for when I have to use other people's amps or my own very portable Fender Blues Jr (which has only two knobs). I don't anticipate using it with my Fuchs ODS because that has buckets of overdrive on tap already. Originally my idea was to use it to fatten up the lead sound on an amp which was already on the point of overdrive - or to be able to drive an amp into mild overdrive if it didn't want to go there by itself - if playing a loud-ish amp in a small pub/club for example. It fattens things up nicely with the volume set to match the level of the amp (about 11 o'clock with the Blues Jr, with gain low, on about 9 o'clock), and gives a kind of rich edge-of-breakup sound that's approaching the Carlton/Ford territory, responding to playing dynamics well. I've used it with humbuckers (Seymour Duncans, Godin, Fender and Gibsons of various types) and single coils (Fender, and Godin). Good for strat and tele players wanting to add a bit of body, and fine with humbuckers too. I've also started to use it in ways I didn't expect: on quite a high-gain setting for an uncouth distorted guitar sound where the material calls for that, but the most interesting use for me is with the Godin at low volume settings. For this, I've got the amp running clean, the Hellbender volume right up, the gain on zero, and the tone right round to five o'clock (top boost, with mid scoop). Leaving the pedal switched on, this gets me a clean (but warmed up) piezo/acoustic sound with the mag guitar volume rolled off, and by rolling up the mag master volume on the guitar, great overdriven lead tones that are in the tele-spank region on teh single-coil setting. And at sound level you could just about converse over. Neat! Not that you'd really need to play this quiet in public, but it does illustrate how the overdrive cleans up with lower volume from the instrument. I'm not keen on tap-dancing so driving it from the guitar suits me fine - very practical at gigs. I'm only rating it 9 on sounds because to give it 10, I'd have to say it was better than a lot of other high-quality pedals, and since I haven't compared it side by side with many, I can't do that. I did A/B it against a Home Brewed double-stage overdrive pedal and although that sounded good too, I found the Hellbender simpler to operate. I also tried the highly-rated (and more expensive) Klon Centaur and didn't see (or hear) any reason to choose that over the Rothwell pedal. I'm not into heavily distorted sounds, just a good meaty complex overdrive, but it seems to me there's plenty of dirt on tap here if you want it. Don't really know why you'd need any more.

Too early to say but it's strongly built in a simple metal case so no reason to think it would not stand up to rough handling. I'd use it without a backup but then I'm not making my living out of this...Only 9 because I can't comment on reliability after 3 months.

Rothwell is a small company run by a pretty enthusiastic audio engineer who also plays guitar. Some of the sound samples on the web site are done by him. He's been very helpful to me, even offering to tweak the pedal for a completely clean zero-gain sound if I wanted (I'm fine with it as it is), and work up a circuit diagram for a guitar re-wire using the Rothwell progressive coil-tap pots. There are good comments about quality of service on various discussion boards I've seen.

It does exactly what I wanted it for. When I bought it from my local guitar shop (M&M Southampton) they'd had it a couple of days and had nearly run the battery down already with playing. They had quite a few boutique overdrive pedals in there and were very impressed with the Rothwell, so I suppose that provides the comparison I couldn't give earlier. I like the understated look of the thing too - just down to earth, no nonsense. There's nothing to dislike about it, although I suppose it would be useful to have two (one set to a darker tone, and one for a wound-up tele sound with single coils or coil-tapped buckers.) I've been playing on and off for several decades, including the odd forgotten one, and I seem to be amassing a collection of guitars that are too valuable to take out to gigs, as well as the odd one I'm not too worried about.