Plug in and Play

The limits for what is possible with our stompbox units these days are damn near endless. The materials and technology to go forward has always been in the grasp of our hand. It is those few gear builders and imaginative fellows that take us forward on a daily basis. In the last couple years there have been many new, exciting, and useful tools for powering up our effects pedals. How we power our pedals is not only a matter of keeping our boxes performing smoothly, I mean yes at the end os the day that is what it is all about. But what if we didn't need to use batteries, or cables, or have to plug into anything other than our patch and guitar cables? Cave Passive Pedals has done this for us, while at the same time delivering a slick collection of effects pedals that will help you paint the town red, green, blue, black, and any other color you can think of.

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Mini Miff
overdrive/booster

* Passive electronic design (no batteries or power adapter needed)
* Two types of overdrive tones
* Boost capabilities
* True bypass
* Works great with guitar and bass
* No need to unplug from input jack to save on power
* Handmade in Australia
* Pedals shipped in handmade wooden box with microfibre cleaning cloth
* All pedals sport a real lifetime warranty

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Why someone hadn't thought of this sooner is absolutely baffling to me! Passive electronics are nothing new, and passive musical devices have been with us for quite some time. Some of our favorite effects come from this timeless technology. From my standpoint I think it's a great idea. Not only does it help with dealing with dead, low power batteries, or tangled wires from power adapters. But this also means no tossing those old batteries in the trash which helps the green movement. I'm no hippy but I do dig the idea of keeping out planet on the up and up for as long as humanly possible.

The Cave Passive Mini Miff pedal is a simple and very versatile effect unit. The pedal's layout consists of In/Out jacks, a true bypass switch, and a single knob which lets you choose from two types of ovedrive and a boost setting. The pedal comes in a beautiful, slick looking handmade trophy type wooden box. Inside the box the pedal is neatly tucked away along with a microfibre cleaning cloth for keeping your pedal neat and sweet. The Mini Miff sounds and works great with many different instruments including guitars, basses, keyboards, and lap steels. I found this pedal paired up beautifully with just about every pickup I threw at it, and was able to stack it up with a handful of my favorite drivers, fuzzes, distortions, and many other types of effects. Setting this pedal up for a good tone is as easy as plugging in and picking your setting with the 3 position rotary knob. The type of pickup, guitar, and amp does make a huge difference with this pedal, meaning it works with whatever you throw at it.

I stacked the Mini Miff up with single coils, humbuckers, and a P90 equipped Junior copy. The amps I dished out for this tone meal were my AC15 clone, modified Hot Rod Deville, and 100 watt Super Lead. I first plugged the Mini Miff into the low watt amp, playing it with the duel humbucker guitar, and setting the amp up to give me as much grit as possible. I must say, my little 15 watt amp really does sweet on it's own and rarely do I find pedals that can give it more of anything. Most pedals if they do give it more balls end up completely changing the character of the amp's tone. I set the Mini Miff to it's clean setting and let her rip. Right away I could feel much more thump, girth, and size in the tone's eq projection. As if the eq circuit got a jolt of energy straight to it's heart. Digging in and slamming down on my guitar's strings really let things become meatier and heavier. Not heavier as in a sharp jagged sound, it was more of what I already had which made this pedal quite a treat. Rolling back the guitar's volume worked pretty too, I found this a perfect way to get a nice dark jazz tone, or boomy blues tone. Next I throttled back the amp's gain and set it for more of a semi-clean tone. I set the amp's clean tone as flat as possible with a hint of brightness to it. The Mini Miff's clean boost again added more of the same, giving the clean tone more attitude and weight. This is great for those of you looking for a hint more from your amp's tone. Next I set the pedal to it's OD1 setting and rolled the amp back up to a gritty dirty tone. The amp on it's own produced a perfect rhythm tone good for blues, rock, classic rock, and rock all together. With the Mini Miff engaged I was able to get a hint of boost to the overdrive signal while able to get a bit of fuzz in the overall sound. This was great for c0nverting a good rhythm tone to a lead tone without having your sound go too crazy. Sometimes all we need to get our tone to climb into a lead tone is a little push. This first setting was perfect for this. The OD2 setting was a bit different, more like a traditional overdrive pedal which takes and drives your sound into that amp break-up thing. Overall I found the Mini Miff to stand up beautifully to the 15 watter's punchy, sweetened sound. Another set up that also stood for me was the Mini Miff through an overdriven Super Lead. Here I was able to get everything from big epic rock tones, stinging leads, throaty rhythm sounds, and darn right aggressive distortion tones. The sound from the 15 watt amp to the 100 watt was a lot different, but what was important was that the feel was all the same. I was still able to control and shape my notes in the exact manner as I did with the low watt amp. I found the Mini Miff didn't produce lots of noise when played through high gain settings which for me was a big big deal. Many pedal can ruin your hard worked tone with hiss and white noise, not with this pedal! I plugged in the P90 equipped Junior copy and rolled the amp's tone back down to a mellow subtle crunch. The combination of the amp's sound, the guitar's pickup, and the pedal gave me a sound that sliced right through the mix and let everything I played be heard perfectly. This is a wonderful pedal for those of us who play with more than one guitar player in a band. I also played the Mini Miff through a couple of my dirt pedals which also sounded damn good. The Mini Miff was able to get a handful more flavors from pedal's I thought had no more to give. With overdrivers I was able to get silky smooth distortion tones. Fuzz pedals I was able to turn into beasts! This led me to plug this pedal into my lap steel. I will tell you right now that this is down right one of the best pedals for dirty lap steel tones I have heard in a long time. The Mini Miff's natural boomy sound also made it perfect for plugging into bass guitars. Keyboards I was able to make much more aggressive which really helped for blending in with rock music. All of this was possible without ever needing to use a battery, plug into an adapter, daisy chain, or any other sort of power source. I never had to unplug from the Mini Miff's input jack, and got a strong and healthy signal the entire time I played it. Cave Passive Pedals has really impressed me with these stompboxes. I hope to get a shot at plugging into more of these bad boys so I can report back to ya'll. It really would be great if these caught on with you players and we started seeing them on more players pedalboards. The Cave Passive pedal line is up to about 20 pedals right now which means they must be doing something right. I encourage you guys to tap into these well made, awesome sounding effects pedals.

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For more info on Cave Passive Pedals go to www.cavepassivepedals.com.au There is a bunch of great info on the website. We will keep you guys up to date on more from this exciting and fresh company so keep your eyes peeled.

Top Finds of 2009 / EP Booster

Xotic Effects never seizes to amaze us. I can look back at each one of the Xotic Effects pedals I've ever had a chance to try out and remember them all as being top-notch. The thing that makes Xotic pedals such desirable pieces of gear is their simplicity. If you've ever had a chance to plug into any of their dirt boxes you know that they're all about getting straight to the point, quickly, and painlessly. While many of the bigger companies are floating towards designing complex and multi-function effects pedals, Xotic has taken the simplest of ideas to create one of the most useful tone tools to hit the streets in a long time. I mean how many different classics does Mr. Mathews plan on playing off of? It's a circus of tasteless, gimmick ridden, trinkets and knick-knacks out there. So when you find yourself lost in a sea of maddening bright boxes and need a straight no chaser, no-frills stompbox that will get the job done and done right. Look towards Xotic Effects.

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Xotic Effects USA

Van Nuys, CA

EP Booster

Features

* Gain Control Knob

* On/Off Status LED

* True Bypass Switching

* Input Jack (nominal input -20DB)

* Output Jack

* DC Jack 2.1mm x 5.5mm / 9-18vdc Negative Center

* Internal DIP Switches: Bass Boost / Bright

* Battery Power: 9V

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The EP Booster is an absolute amazing little pedal with an unbelievable capability to enhance and push your sound. I gotta hand it to Xotic Effects for one of the coolest little pedals to come out last year. The idea for designing the EP Booster came from mighty pre-amp section that can be found in the classic EP-3 Echoplex's. I don't know about you guys but I've had a chance to plug into a handful of different EP-3's in my time, and every time I have I've been blown away by how killer of tone their pre-amp sections are capable of. The EP-3's pre-amp is a little trick I've seen many studio cats use to enhance and give their guitar tracks some edge. Amongst the many engineers and everyday cats like myself who have fallen in love with the Echoplex preamp sound, there have been many heavyweight professional's who have also counted on it for their signature and root tone's. Cats like Brian May, Tommy Bolin, Joe Walsh, Jimmy Page, and the man himself Mr. Hendrix have all used Echoplex preamp's to give their tone some mojo. Xotic Effects has now taken this wonderful tool and shoved into 3.5"x1.5"x1.5" enclosure. This way you get all the killer tone without having to sacrifice much space on your pedalboard, lord knows we can use all we can get. On the EP Booster you will find a true bypass switch and solo knob used for controlling the gain amount, but there's more! Inside the EP Booster is a whole nother story. In the pedal's guts you will find a couple of DIP switches, one for boosting the bass, and another for flat or bright eq. This gives you the ability to match or give your sound a little color, and if you're looking for a little something extra take it from me, use the pedal's magical little color.

Like all of our demos we like make sure we use as many different scenario's as possible. We try and pull out as many amps, guitars, use different style pickups, and even run the gear we demo through other pedals to see how they react. The EP Booster came through with flying colors, working beautifully with everything we used it with and sounding magnificent on it's own. The scenario we worked with EP Booster was Strat, Twin Reverb, and two Bullet Cables. We set the amp with all eq at 7, volume at 3-4, reverb at 2, bright switch off. The EP Booster was set in it's default setting with the Bass Boost off, and Bright on. The sound of the Twin Rev alone of course sounded damn sweet, full of richness and boom. With the EP Booster engaged things got even better! It's kind of hard to explain if you've never heard what a EP-3 Echoplex sounds like when driving an amp. It's not so much that it works to boost your sound into an overdrive, which it can do, the magic is on the hint of color that it throws on your sound. It covers a wider, rounder frequency range for the bass, and shines a little light on the highs and mids. The result is a tone that's a bit tighter, richer, and able to cover more ground. At first you don't notice much a difference, then you start hammering away at some chords and begin to feel the sound around you becoming much nicer. I always say the best guitar tones are the ones you feel and not so much hear. I did the same thing with an overdriver set after the EP Booster and got the same results. The creamy overdrive setting I had dialed in went from great to greater. There was more definition in the grit and a lot more flavor in the overall sound. Before I moved onto the vintage setting in the DIP switches I decided to plug my guitar into a 100 watt Super Lead, dial in some natural overdrive, and boost the signal with EP Booster's default setting. I set the amp fairly crunchy, with lots of mids and lows. Once I kicked in the pedal I could hear the everything tighten up and become a bit more complex. It was apparent this pedal was going to work with just about anything I threw at it. Next I kicked in the pedal's vintage setting, which is both DIP switches in the off position. Here the tone was able to maintain all of the character I had work into the amp only with a warmer and fluffier feel. The overdrive had more of a classic rock vibe to it, some where between a Page and Townshend tone. Not too shabby hey? The pedal worked great with everything, other boosters, overdrivers, distortions boxes, fuzz pedals, and best of all on it's own through an already dirty tone or clean sound. Xotic's mission to build a simple way to achieve the EP-3's preamp sound is a definite success. With the EP Booster's DIP switched it makes things even that much better. This simple little box turned out to be much more complex than I though it would be, and created a handful of tones that some multi knob pedal's aren't capable of. I'm proud to say the EP Booster now lives on my pedalboard, in front of everything else, and always on. It makes shaping things after it much easier and more precise. If you guys get a chance to plug into one go for it, grab a nice guitar, plug into a decent amp, and watch it add life to any signal.

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For more info on Xotic Effects go to www.xotic.us or click on the logo in our sidebar for a direct link. Also go down to our Youtube search engine and type in "EP Booster" for some cool video demos from the Xotic Guitars Youtube channel. Stay tunes for more form this awesome company in the near future. Peace!!!