After tantalisingly teasing us over a number of days on social media, Redbeard Effects has finally unveiled the third pedal in its lineup, the evocatively titled Angry Rhubarb Paradynamic Overdrive MKII.
The Angry Rhubarb is the British pedal brand's first overdrive pedal, and it offers something completely different to the common or garden overdrives we all know and love. This, after all, is paradynamic overdrive, and it does something very cool when it comes to the thorny subject of EQ and overdrive.
Indeed, there is something Solomon-esque in the wisdom behind its design, as Redbeard splits the difference in the debate over placing drives before or after the EQ section, by housing two drive circuits either side of a highly interactive parametric EQ.
Redbeard says the design takes "a surgical approach to sculpting your tone" as the parametric EQ reacts with both drives either side of it.
Housed in the now almost-familiar Redbeard enclosure style, it features controls for Pre Drive and Post Drive to set the level of drive either said of the EQ, Volume to control the pedal's output, and two hot-pink knobs. The Freq knob lets you set the frequency – anywhere between 80Hz and 4kHz – while the Freq Gain knob applies +6dB of boost or cut to those frequencies. Pretty neat.
Founded in 2019 by Skindred's Mikey Demus with Adrian Thorpe of ThorpyFX, Redbeard has made quite an impression on our pedalboards, with the British pedal company's Honey Badger octave fuzz and Red Mist MKIV distortion offering a fresh twist on the effects, with tweakable formats and plenty of room for the adventurous player to explore. And the Angry Rhubarb is very much built in this spirit.
It has an all-analogue signal path, is true bypass, and arrives in a cloth sack with some stickers and a Redbeard Effects PCB Keyring. And all this can be yours for £185. The Angry Rhubarb is available now. See Redbeard for more details.
