Beetronics FX has another ambrosian treat for your pedalboard. It’s called the Nectar Tone Sweetener and it has switchable overdrive and fuzz settings to cover most bases when it comes to driven electric guitar tone.
As part of the Beetronics Babee Series, it is as compact and straightforward as the whackadoodle guitar effects pedal brand gets, with a trio of dials aligned across the top of the pedal and a mode toggle switch for selecting overdrive or fuzz.
But as simple as this twofer drive pedal might be, it promises a lot of versatility, too. Players can dial in just a little bit of hair to heat things up, an overdrive pedal voicing that calls to mind vintage Fender tube amps, or they can dial in a sound that’s a little more gnarly, switching over to the fuzz pedal setting for modern high-gain sounds.
There are knobs for Volume, Honey and Taste. Volume is self-explanatory. Honey controls how much gain is in your signal while Taste acts as your EQ.
It is a neat design. With those knobs positioned at the top of the slanted enclosure, there is less chance of your foot accidentally adjusting the settings when switching the pedal on and off. But with this having ‘Tone Sweetener’ in its name, we’re guessing that Beetronics is counting on us having it on more often than not.
The drive circuit is voiced to be reactive to your playing. Set the Honey (gain) dial below noon for those old-school Tweed tones that have just enough grit for the blues licks to pop. As you crank the gain, that overdrive voicing becomes fuller and richer as the signal saturates.
Fuzz can be notoriously selective, either sounding too reedy with single-coil pickups, too woolly with humbuckers, too sputtery for those parts that you need to articulate cleanly, but Beetronics promises a more contemporary voicing from this fuzz circuit that sees it not only pair well with guitars and amps of all types, but also is easy to stack with other gain pedals.
As ever with Beetronics, the enclosure really is something to look at, and if you’re worried all that metalwork on the top of the pedal makes it hard to see what’s going a pair of LEDs are on hand to let you know whether the overdrive or fuzz mode is active.
The Nectar Tone Sweetener is available now, priced $199. It takes 9V from a pedalboard power supply and draws 30mA. For more details, head over to Beetronics FX.
