I bought this because I wanted have an approximation of the Hendrix live sound for Machine Gun (and basically all of the Band of Gipsies material).
The man himself obviously used a Shenei Univibe which still exists in the form of several clones usually at a steep price. So how does this 35 Euro pedal stack up against the original sound ideal?
To be honest: I can't really say. I can only tell you what I hear.
Test setup is as always a fully shielded self built Tele with Fender Tex-Mex pickups through an Orange Crush 20, clean channel fairly clean, dirt channel in slight breakup. For this test I put the TC Electronics Cinders first and the TC Electronics Forcefield Compressor after that. The Blood moon is last in the chain before the amp.
I must admit, at first I thought you'll have to keep all the controls rather low to get a good "three dimensional" sound from the phaser without going all "jetplanetakeoff" but having checked it out again just now I'm quite amazed how versatile and usable the pedal reacts even into extreme settings except for the "rate" knob: the last 5% of the way are pretty weird.
I can get some sort of almost unnoticeable "ambient" depth to my tone (in all pickup settings), I can get distinctive flange-y sounds (especially in higher gain), I can get an acceptable Lesley-wobble (minus the tremolo-effect) at higher rate-settings and - which was important to me - I can get that almost Univibe sound with the chugging/smacking sound from the strings in conjunction with the single coils. For me that sound is reasonably satisfactory. But then I don't go and play big stages or Festivals (who does at the mo?). If I did that I'd probably go for something closer to the original.
For the use at home or in your band's practice room or for small gigs this is a good solution to add some dimension to your guitar playing without breaking the bank.
One thing though: Activating the pedal adds a boost of around 5-8db to your signal so you might have to dial the volume of your guitar down or use the Blood Moon as an always on effect or (as I did - use the level knob of the Forcefield Compressor (which I seem to have always on these days) as a compensation tool. It might well be that the boost effect isn't that prevalent in longer effect chains but just that you know there could be problems.
I'm happy with this pedal and I just had an hour of fun just checking out all the dials (again), and if it wasn't for the unexpected and unnecessary boost in volume this would be a five star. But still I think this is well worth checking out.
