So if you haven’t seen it already, we just put out an interview with NOKILL Pedal Co, and it’s a treasure trove of feel-good pedal dog love and effects pedal geekery, not to mention the landing page for today’s exciting giveaway – get all the details and check it out here.
We’ll circle back around to the rules and embed the teaser at the end of this one as well, but because we had so much fun with the Borzoi Glitch Fuzz that we somehow won in a raffle last week, we had to separate the two articles. This one gets into the nitty gritty with a few of soundbites to drive the point home – you can practically hear us wrapping our minds around it’s benevolent, low-end consciousness expansion.
Remember, it’s not just that NOKILL Pedal Co makes sick pedals – 10% of all their proceeds get donated to One Tail At A Time, a non-profit dog rescue, particularly their West Texas / Marfa branch. In a world that makes less and less sense, it’s more and more a wonder that dogs still love us. It’s such a cliche to use the term “who rescued who,” but after we adopted Salem the Staffy from Best Friends Animal Society, the love in our life, in all areas, increased so many times over. But again, you can get teary eyed and read all of that in the other article.
Let’s get to it.
This little sizzler is the first track we cut while trying to figure out the relationship between the Borzoi’s controls – the Blend, Filter, and Volume all interact with how the momentary glitch knob on the left side will do, so the first thing you hear at 00:12 are all the knobs about 9:00 without the glitch. Leading up to that is a bit of chill dry signal introducing the rhythm and lead context, and then, boom – at 00:25, a greasy little Jack White impression or two appear as we hold down the glitch knob and let it rip like… well, a glitched out, rabid borzoi shredding the blues.
After a little jangly interlude, we get moresonic destruction on rhythm guitars at 1:04 – same knob settings, Telecaster tuned to E flat. And yet, it kind of sounds like we have an entire hardcore band inside the guitar. There’s also a tapping line on top of it that’s more or less an ode to Brent Hinds, using the same exact settings. There’s also a lead panned a little to the left, again, same exact settings. Why won’t we shut up about the exact same settings thing? Because if it were an ordinary 1-octave down pedal, this likely wouldn’t be possible without a mess of intermingling phases and tracking transients. But because it’s two octaves down, there’s some kind of magic in the tracking that seems to enjoy being layered.
Already seeing how this low-end magic could interact with a host of pedals we already own, we weren’t afraid to get weird with the Borzoi almost immediately, so we decided to push the second track with some semi-metallic post-rock and detuned 7-string shred. For the first few seconds you hear the repeated phrase going through our trusty Old Blood Noise Endeavors Excess V2, placed after the Borzoi. This way when we turn on the Borzoi we’ll get a tiny boost of an additional shimmer-octave and a fifth above the root note, already boosted with the 2-octave down when the Borzoi is engaged. At 10 seconds in, you can hear the same line with the Borzoi engaged, and then we crush it with a plodding, almost shoe gaze sounding moment, with the lead alternating between Borzoi + Excess and just the Borzoi every other phrase.
At 00:40, you hear the 7-string part start, almost taking kind of a nod from Chevelle‘s chuggy, fuzzy attack from their Wonder What’s Next era. At 1:14 is where we try something almost a little risky – we increased the time on the OBNE Excess, meaning that the fifth/shimmer wouldn’t happen for roughly half a second, adding what sounds like a chasing harmony to the shred, which you can still clearly hear has the Borzoi engaged on the initial attacks. So you have an octave down attack, and then a barely delayed sparkle to it. At the very end, you hear an almost comical engagement with the glitch side, again turning us into a feisty Jack White with zero warning. This was about the time we had to just get up and walk around the house out of sheer exhaustion and amazement. What was happening to us?
So what about on bass? Oh, we’re so glad you asked. On the track above, you can hear just how nasty the glitch mode can get, mostly using a 5-string J-bass with flat wounds. Flat wounds don’t have as much attack, but you don’t absolutely need it for a situation like this. The first bass hit is just the bass signal – the second hit is with the Borzoi engaged. The third hits leads into an unearthly squelch – this is where we started to play around with the controls the most, because that gurgling surge at 00:10 took a moment to find, and it was excavated by moving the Blend knob around a little higher to 11:00. When you engage the Glitch, you can hear the pedal freak out in different ways and at different rates. Getting closer to noon and beyond with the Volume and Blend started to scoop our actual pick attack, which then gave us the idea for the track’s funky middle at 00:31, as well as the outro. In fact, the little glitch ballad at the end 1:19 is with all the controls completely dimed for what feels like a purely glitched signal. We used a guitar for that part and for some filigree in the beginning, but the heavy part right before that at 1:03, as well as most of the track outside of the drums, is just a bass. At 1:03, we layered the bass amp with the bass going through two guitar amps as well, just to give it even more guttural charm.
This one is almost funny, we were still testing on the 7-string when it came to us that we should try some more tapping through the pedal because the guitar had lower action than the telecaster, not to mention Dimarzio D-Activator humbuckers. We also wanted to use the DAW to our advantage on this one – so after the little bass thing, at 00:07, you hear the Borzoi engaged on a 7-string in C-standard being tapped to all hell through the Neural DSP Archetype Tim Henson X plugin with a doubler engaged. The doubled signal is balanced at noon / zero, and at 00:23 you can hear a dry version (no Borzoi engaged, yet) layered in on the left to see how either tracking twice or using a doubler can not just save you time but also add a ton of depth at a moment’s notice. At 00:45, a similar phrase is repeated but with the Borzoi engaged on the left.
The last one, for now, was sort of a last minute surprise. After we had opened the Archetype Tim Henson X above, we started playing around with some of the artist presets, and landed on Charlie Robbin’s space-freak drum and bass setting called “FX-Faded Memories.” At first, we just started dicking around with a melody that reminded us of Unreal Tournament. We couldn’t program the dnb drums though, so we actually ended up with something way more diverse.
So of course, we thought to ourselves, “what’s this sound like with the Borzoi?” The Answer: exactly as it should. Check out the repeated phrase and let it enfold you for the first 25 seconds – it’s nothing fancy. But at 00:25 when the drums drop out, you hear that Borzoi shape things up considerably on the exact same phrase. It’s just… more authoritative, more throat-y, and doesn’t lose all the top end so much as it tames it, which was unexpected. We also threw the OBNE Excess back into play, this time using the V1 before the Borzoi, because we used it on the chorus setting to give some more motion to the low-end and see how it would react through both the Borzoi and the Tim Henson X at 00:45. We also dice things up and switch from chorus mode to fifth-harmony at about 01:02, taking us into the stratosphere.
But just when you think “okay, this is a little electro for me,” we take things… to something that kind of sounds like Linkin Park or Ill Nińo at 01:12. Just because, you know? We panned the guitars a little further here too so you can hear space the Borzoi creates in rhythm guitar tracks, with each sitting at 45 degrees. Between their frothy differences, it creates the perfect sea of noise between them, and to close out, we riff a little in the key of Alice In Chains by way of Turnstile.
You’d think that at this point, we’d be sick of the damn thing, but we are constantly drawn back to the Borzoi Glitch Fuzz, and we’re not talking every few hours – we’re talking every half hour or so we’d have a new idea for NOKILL Pedal Co’s latest masterpiece. If you are looking for pedals that start somewhere familiar, but also take you into the deepest reaches of your imagination, NKPC would be an incredible place to start. Check out their selection here.
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Which brings us back to the rules for our incredible giveaway:
“Here’s the deal:
-you buy a NOKILL pedal, you get one entry.
-you buy a CUSTOM NOKILL pedal, you get five entries
-there will be two winners: one gets a Borzoi Glitch Fuzz, the other gets a mystery pedal bundle worth $500: two pedals and a special prize!
-I am also offering free shipping when you use ‘fecking’ at checkout!
-I will also have flash sales that are worth 5 additional entries!”