MusicRadar Verdict
Providing plenty of variation on the distortion/drive theme, a pedal with two engines at this price is a steal.
Pros
- +
Great performance and price.
Cons
- -
Primarily for high-gain players.
MusicRadar's got your back Our team of expert musicians and producers spends hours testing products to help you choose the best music-making gear for you. Find out more about how we test.
Because it’s called the Pugilist you might expect it to deliver brutal distortion, but while it can definitely do that there’s a subtler side to this distortion pedal.
What it offers are dual gain engines (A and B) linked to a Blend knob so you can have 100 percent A or B or a mix of both. This is a brilliant feature as there’s a wide variation of tone available from blending the two channels especially as each has its own adjustable Gain and Tone.
Channel A offers a slightly milder distortion than B so you can use a touch of A with brightened tone to add clarity and pick attack to the saturated sound of B or have a mixture of both reminiscent of playing through two amps.
You can also choose to run the two engines in series where full-on high-gain sound with rich harmonics is pretty much guaranteed. The Pugilist is also capable of raunchy overdrive at lower levels of gain.
“The look of a road warrior that has many more glorious miles ahead of it”: Charvel’s new limited edition Super-Stock So-Cal Style 1 is a box-fresh hotrodded S-style that looks like it’s got some serious city miles on it
Has Behringer gone too far with the 676, its clone of the Universal Audio 6176?
“I didn’t have to learn every rhythm and tempo to be at the standard of a studio musician. I learnt what I had to learn and I think I did pretty well": The Monkees' drummer Micky Dolenz says he had the musical chops that his role required
