EngelFaeuste
New member
DISCLAIMER: If you are easily offended, don't read this review, I will not be held liable for your making a choice to read it, by reading it, you absolve me of all liability for any offense taken at it's contents. I would also like to state that any original ideas in the following write-up are statements of opinion.
General idea behind conception
Clearly, the people at Blackstar truly believe that vacuum tubes are better than transistors. These people also happen to be willing to do anything to eliminate the evil of solid state technology from their circuits. When you think about it, the whole thing is bonkers, the designers probably thought: "Hey, it'll be fun if we can take a tube preamp from a head and cram it into a pedal! Let's have it run at the same voltages too!" With that, the Blackstar HT pedal range was conceived and topping the tables in terms of insanity, would be the DistX (The Gus G pedal is an artist gimmick, please ignore it's existence for the purpose of this review).
Aesthetics
Clean, no silly graphics that make your pedal look like the 2010 US economy. (DO YOU HEAR ME YOU F***ING BOUTIQUE PEDAL IDIOTS?!). There is no cheap plastic to be found at first glance, everything except the window behind the grill and the LED is made of metal. The bottom is a rather pleasing sight as well, no cheap looking rubber feet, but something which clearly had some thought put into it.
Build Quality
I have been using and abusing this pedal for over a year now, and it has never given me any problems (I wish people were like that). The knobs are still smooth, mechanical resistance on all of them is still linear and even.
Knobbly knobs explained
Gain - Face the wall, pull your ears and do 20 squats if you don't know what this does, because clearly, you are a moron.
Ok, I'm not going to go through Bass, Middle, Treble and Volume or some people will be trying to touch their nose with their elbows while eating cheese and squatting with one leg on a toilet seat.
Here's the really clever bit about this pedal, the knob labelled "ISF". No, it has nothing to do with Lexus' compact executive with fake exhausts. According to the manual, it shapes your tone to sound more 'American' or 'British'. However it doesn't sound noisy and uncivilized on the American side, so the manual is lying. From the sound graphs I've seen, what the ISF (They call it the infinite sound feature, I just like to think of it as an inbuilt sound f***er) does is that it shifts the mid scoop around. This can really change the sound you are getting off the pedal.
Interesting bits
You know how some pedals have more than two holes? This happens to be one of them. It's labelled 'Simulated Output'. Blackstar says you can plug a speaker right in there and it'll sound like an amp. I've tried it using an X-mini and it sounds great, just need to tweak the settings around a little, it should have no issues sounding like an amp.
How it sounds
It is not the heaviest, it is not the crunchiest, but damn it is the clearest. I've tried a range of pedals which can handle metal, and nothing comes close. This may not be the pedal for you if you want to play somewhat sludgier death metal. However, if you're playing power metal or thrash metal, and you want all the clarity you can get, the DistX is for you. For the other men who lost a Y chromosome and for the women, this pedal can handle low gain playing as well, just turn down the gain knob!
Last thoughts
Everything about this pedal says "BUY ME!" except the price tag. At close to SG$300, it is anything but cheap. On the other hand, many idiots here have more cheap pedals than I have tiles in my toilet. I'm sure you can sell a few of them to a toilet til- I mean cheap pedal collector and buy yourself a proper distortion.
Cheers,
Morgan Johann Lee
As usual, legal disclaimer above.
Last edited:
