Add Some Dirt with Greer Pedals

How many dirt pedals are enough? A question for the ages perhaps, but in the eyes of Nick Greer of Greer Amplification, the answer is the ones that give you the tones that you want. Seems fair enough.

I first heard of Greer, watching Anderton’s Music videos where owner Lee “The Captain” Anderton kept coming back on his pedal board to the Greer Lightspeed. One would be correct that Lee Anderton could pick any pedals that he wanted, Anderton’s is after all one of the largest online music stores in the world and well respected for regular videos extolling the joys of gear to help one make music. So what was driving this fellow to a small pedal company out of Austin Texas?

Enquiring minds and all that, but I couldn’t find out because Greer did not have a local reseller. I don’t pick gear because some star uses it, or because I saw an interesting video, or because I thought it sounded good in a video. Goodness knows that there are plenty of pedals that one could buy that way.

I want to try the pedal out, with a guitar that I know and an amp that I know. I choose guitars and amps based on clean tones, that’s my thing and if there needs to be some dirt, either get it out of the amp (which usually requires volume levels that many would find a bit excessive) or with a pedal. I was very pleased to learn that The Arts Music Store was going to be carrying gear.

I’m not compensated to write this and while I am as always extraordinarily grateful to Carl the owner of the store for making kit available to me to test, he’s also smart enough to know that if I ask to test something, his odds are pretty darn good that the only thing about it that he will see again is a transaction. He’s a very smart fellow, Carl is.

Now that we can actually go into stores again, I was in the shop and met a fellow who had driven in from the town of Whitby (about 45 minutes away) because he had seen that the shop was carrying Greer. We got to talking and he shared that for what he played, he found that the Greer pedals did what he wanted in a clean interface with excellent reliability and low noise.

I worked with Carl to get for a short time three Greer pedals to try out.

For the audio samples, which are never going to win fans, the guitar is a Les Paul Axcess running into a REVV D20 using the built in Torpedo with appropriate amp and cab sims. For the Lightspeed it’s a Silverface Fender Twin, for the Royal Velvet it’s an AC30 and for the Supa Cobra, it’s a Marshall 1960A. For the first two pedals, I used the Axcess in single coil mode and for the Supa Cobra, I used the Axcess in Humbucker mode. Due to timing and location, I did not use my Apollo interface, I ran the XLR out from the D20 into a RODECASTER Pro and as that device does not have a “line” option on the input, chose the EV RE20 mic type as it was the most neutral. I did NO audio processing on the samples and you can sure tell. However, you do get a decent sense of what the pedal does, although in hindsight, I would probably back off the gain more on the Lightspeed.

Lightspeed

The Lightspeed may be the best known of the various Greer pedals. It is referred to as a light to medium overdrive and delivers the kinds of tones that I favour. Regular readers know that I am not a fan of Tube Screamers, and the Lightspeed is definitely not one of those. If I had to say that it was kind of like something else, I would suggest a Marshall Bluesbreaker. At $250 CAD you are getting a higher end overdrive that has a very wide range of tones with nice cleanup, good sweep on the tone control and a lot of flexibility when using the drive control. It runs on 9V DC, but can handle up to 18V DC and if your power supply can do that, I recommend it as it increases the overall headroom, and gives you a bit more openness. I use CIOKS power supplies specifically for their isolation and ability to select by port how much power is delivered.

The pedal is built in a solid aluminum box and other than the face label (which is available in different colours for different occasions) is pretty much unadorned. To some extent it looks like a kit pedal and information like the serial number is handwritten on the back with what is probably black Sharpie. The box is a simple cardboard box with a label on it. This is my opinion only, but it appears that the company is more concerned with the sound delivered than the Internet non-phenomena of an unboxing exercise or spending a fortune on the packaging that on its best day ends up on a shelf someday. Fancy packaging vs better gear? I will take the better gear every time.

My sample was a bit sensitive to cable noise but it was not a significant issue.

Royal Velvet

The Royal Velvet is another light to medium overdrive but is designed to deliver the sounds that you would expect to hear from a certain British 30 watt amplifer whose initials could very well be AC. It’s not precisely supposed to be a VOX sounding box, more an amalgam of a VOX and a Greer Thunderbolt (Greer Amps, big surprise, also makes amplifiers). The tone is British Class A. The Royal Velvet can be used as a drive pedal, but because it incorporates its own transformer can be used as a preamp itself. This makes the product part of Greer’s XFR linep, identified by the transformer icon on the label. The controls are simple. Volume, Gain and Tone. It is definitely thicker sounding than the Lightspeed and in fairness I only used it as a pedal, not as a preamp.

This is where I interject on the subject of pedals that are meant to sound like an amplifier. In concept it sounds lovely, but the sound of an amp is driven more by the output transformer and the speaker system than anything else. The Royal Velvet does have the transformer, but to really get “that” sound you need a suitable cabinet. As noted above, my test system was a REVV D20 using it’s built-in Torpedo to an FRFR speaker system. I own a number of Torpedo Cab Sims, and for this test used their very fine AC30 Cab Sim. That combined with the Royal Velvet delivered a very nice overdriven VOX sound. I did not find it all so VOXy with other cabinet simulations through in the FRFR, consistent with my experience with other pedals designed to emulate an amp sound when used with the wrong cabinet. When used with the right cabinet or the right cabinet simulation IR, it’s pretty darn cool. If I were doing a gig or a session where I needed the sound of a driven AC30 and didn’t want to carry one, I could be very effective with the REVV D20, a proper cab sim and a Royal Velvet.

Supa Cobra

If by this point, you are asking, ok where’s the Marshall sounding pedal, here it is, and more. The Supa Cobra has the three expected controls for Volume, Gain and in this case Treble, plus two other controls. The Body control has impact on low end boom and presence. Dialed all left, boominess is reduced, turn to the right to add some boom back and to increase low end presence. It takes some experimentation to find options that you like, but once you do, it’s a very nice feature.

The centre 3 way toggle varies the pedal voicing by altering how clipping happens. In the top position, called Fat, you get a nice overdriven sound that is as Greer describes, “more chewy”. It’s a good adjective, sounding thicker and with a bit more density overall. The middle position is the focus is on the natural drive of the op amp in the pedal. It’s a nice overdrive, subtly different from the Lightspeed and other overdrives, I found it kind of similar to a JHS Morning Glory in the boost position. The bottom position, labeled LED, is that Marshall tone, best delivered with the gain knob turned up. It’s a pretty nice tone overall.

Like the Royal Velvet, the use of the “right” cabinet really comes into play here. In the D20 I have IRs for Marshall small cabs and 4x12s. By matching the cabinet to the goal desired, the Supa Cobra is a pretty darn nice Marshally sound, and I personally preferred it over other “plexi” style drives that I have tried. Note that unlike the Royal Velvet or the Lightspeed, the Supa Cobra is 9v only.

Conclusions

I’m probably the wrong guy to ask which pedal to buy as I operate on the attitude that if a pedal tone makes you happy and encourages you to play more, practice more or write more, that’s not a bad thing. Yes you can end up with shelves and drawers of pedals this way, but a decent pedal holds value pretty well over time, and there are always dingbats on Reverb that you can fish in with ludicrous pricing if you are patient. All you have to do is wait for a pedal to become hard to get, ie King of Tone, or SOLD OUT ONLINE (Supa Cobra) and you have a marketplace.

My modality is the first one. Does the pedal inspire me? In the case of all three, I would say that the answer is yes. I already own some pedals that do very nicely what these Greers do, that cost about the same or frequently more, so I have not yet decided which ones I am going to buy, that’s some math work for tomorrow.

But that’s me. You on the other hand are likely to love these pedals, so why not visit the store or go online to theartsmusicstore.com They are really great folks and they carry Greer pedals in stock.

Thanks for reading and until next time, peace.