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Price: £129; effects: distortion; controls: volume, tone, drive; connections: input, output, power; power: 9V battery
Like pedals of yore, the Skumstortion has one effect and minimal knobs, so it’ll live or die on the class of its distortion. ProTone is confident, citing the “wicked high-gain sustain that can rival a stack of amps”, and promising “from screaming leads to rhythm work, it delivers the goods.”
So you clock the rotting skull on the Skumstortion’s bulletproof chassis and you think, “This is going to be mental!” And it kinda is. Set the drive and tone at two-thirds, stomp the footswitch, and you get a really brittle, biting attack that’s totally satisfying for old-school metal, giving good note articulation and enough low end to shake the ceiling.
Many rockers will happily stick there, and their £129 will be well-spent. But when the hairier contingent crank the drive to the max on the hunt for savage, modern, Mesa-style filth, they’ll get diminishing returns, with the Skumstortion never quite going as crazy as its blurb suggests. Or maybe our ears are just desensitised after all these years.
