![]() ![]() I’ll admit that it’s freakishly identical to the 10 series Graphic EQ, down to the fact that they use the same exact frequencies. Personally, it’s not my cup of tea (it’s a little too buzzy for me), and that’s okay. If you like treble, you’re going to enjoy playing this pedal. It has bass, middle, and treble, but the treble is the star of the show. It kind of sounds like a swarm of bees being chased by vampires. ![]() I’ll just admit it: I have no clue what the circuit is. This pedal also has a dynamite graphic in the center of the enclosure that lights up, which lets me know it has LED clipping inside. Instead, Maxon gives it a camouflage pattern and they add knives. ![]() Even in the first product release photo, it’s hidden in the shadows, as though Maxon wanted you to know straight out of the gate that one of these pedals was not like the others.Įvery other pedal in this series has a straightforward color-block design, but the SM-F1 Super Metal operates completely outside of those branding rules. The SM-F1 Super Metal is utterly confusing, but in the best way. Maybe it’s something to do with the DSP design for this series, but at the end of the day: a digital delay is a digital delay. It's nothing fancy, but it sounds really, really good. The DE-F1 Delay Effector has level, repeat, and time. They changed the bass and put in a slightly different tone control which really sets this apart from other Tube Screamers in the herd. My assumption is that OD-F1 is based on the Ibanez TS-10 (the 10 series was released in ’89, and the Fireblade series hit the scene about five years later). I haven’t seen The Lion King in a while, so cut me some slack. Then the pedals become grass, and the antelopes eat the grass, and the guitar players eat the antelopes. Pedal makers will always create more Tube Screamers, and guitarists will always play them. The world didn't need one, but Maxon still gave us one, and there’s a kind of “circle of life” rationale to that. The OD-F1 Overdrive is yet another Tube Screamer. So, unless someone time traveled, that's impossible. Unfortunately, that theory doesn’t hold water, because the SoundTank series was released by Ibanez in 1999, whereas the Fireblade series was released by Maxon in 1994. So you can understand why it took me a while to get all these pedals together.īefore we dive in, I’d like to address a rumor floating around on Gear Page that the Maxon Fireblade pedals are actually Ibanez SoundTank pedals in a different enclosure. Were the final three pedals added later, or did they leave them out on purpose?Ĥ.) The writing on the pedals was in English, even though these pedals were exclusively marketed in Japan, which begs the question: where should I be looking for people to buy these pedals from? Japan or the rest of the English-speaking world? These pedals could have been based on any third-party designs that Maxon produced.ģ.) The original print ad from a Japanese guitar magazine in 1994 showed five pedals, even though the series itself included eight. ![]() I don’t speak, read, or understand Japanese, which puts me at a slight disadvantage.Ģ.) It was produced through Maxon, a private label/OEM manufacturer for Ibanez, so the true origins of this pedal line are a little mysterious. There were a ton of factors:ġ.) This pedal line was exclusive to Japan, and thus any advertising copy that might help me locate these pedals was written in Japanese. In fact, this series of just eight pedals literally took me two years to collect. The Maxon Fireblade Series was not simple to collect. Check Sweetwater, check Reverb, check your local music store. Not necessarily easy (after all, it wouldn’t be very satisfying if you just walked into your local Guitar Center and saw all the pedals you’d been looking for laid out like ducks in a row), but the collecting itself still tends to be simple. A lot of pedal series are fairly simple to collect. ![]()
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