Tag: Mad Professor

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TIL: The Amber Drive And Golden Cello Are The Same Drive Pedal

When it comes to pedal manufacturers, I’m a huge fan of Mad Professor pedals. I’ve owned pretty much all of their older (pre-Simple) drive pedals over the years, and I’ve probably logged more hours playing these pedals than any other brands’.

So I was floored when I recently read that the Golden Cello is actually an Amber Drive with added delay (a la the Bluebird Overdrive). How did I miss that?!? But it’s true.

The reason I hadn’t noticed this before? I’ve always used my Golden Cello with the delay turned up a bit (it’s endless hours of fun with an ebow), and it’s an older delay design that doesn’t feature a dry signal blend. ie, the delay colours the sound quite a bit.

Turn the delay off, and hey presto: the two pedals are identical.

So if you’ve always been curious about the Amber Overdrive, but found the second hand prices too high, keep an eye out for a Golden Cello. In my experience, the Golden Cello often goes for rock-bottom prices.

I guess I’m not the only one who didn’t know about this!

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New Arrivals For May 2020

It’s been the second full month of lockdown. eBay remains quiet, partly because sensible folks are reluctant to head out to post parcels, and partly because eBay has been limiting their discount sales fees to once a month.

The blog’s been quiet too. I’ve had some other things in life to deal with. So many basic, run-of-the-mill things are difficult-to-impossible to resolve when most of society has shut down. It’s one thing to know it, it’s quite another thing to experience it first hand.

Here’s what’s arrived this month. Spoiler alert: it’s all really good stuff, and there’ll be full First Impressions blog posts for each of them soon.

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New Arrivals For July 2019

This month has been a month of two very different stories: guitars and pedals.

On the guitar front, I’ve been very fortunate to find a couple of guitars that blew my socks right off. Proper love-at-the-first-note through an amp fairytale stuff. Fairytales don’t always have a happy ending, mind, so do check back in the months ahead to learn whether these do (or don’t)!

Pedals have been much more of a mixed bag. Good deals have been hard to come by this month, with a lot of people chasing a smaller pool of 2nd hand gear. Maybe it’s the summer months, or maybe it’s the renewed uncertainty here in Britain atm? Either way, I hope things pick up.

I’m doing something a bit different this month. Rather than try and squeeze my first impressions into 3 or 4 paragraphs (to keep these ‘New Arrivals’ posts short), I’ve started breaking them out into separate posts that I’m linking to from here. It gives me a bit more space to talk about each piece of gear. Do you like it? Or do you prefer the ‘all-in-one’ format I’ve been using up to now? Let me know in the comments below.

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