Hello fellow dirt dissenters, thank you for giving in to your
tonal temptations and following the spirits of the path less
traveled to the dynamic audio grinder known as Zoar
®
.
Zoar reaches back the past and keeps its eyes on the
future. A classic fuzz living communally with a time tested
three band passive EQ section; informed by modern
precision and a little bit of midwestern witchcraft. A tool
designed to delight the seekers and the purists alike. One
foot in the gutter, one fist in the gold if you will…
Zoar is a medium-high gain discrete distortion (using
only transistors; no opamps or diodes in here!) that has
that touch sensitive amp-like quality to it that everyone
craves. It has been finely tuned to create a highly
tweakable hi-fi and modern sounding distortion, but with
the ghosts of old school circuitry to deliver a grind that is
both instantly familiar and delightfully unique. Want that
defined sparkle and tightness of an overdrive? This has it.
Want that low-medium gain fuzz that’s perfect for drop
tuned guitars and basses? This has it. Want to be able to
dial in and control every nuance of your tone from jangly
on-the-verge of break up to blowing the walls out heavy
saturation? Then this is the pedal for you.
This meticulously crafted box has six knobs that allow
you to truly customize your sound with the
Level
,
Weight
,
Gain
,
Bass
,
Middle
, and
Treble
controls. The red LED light
indicates when the distortion is activated by the Flexi-
Switch
®
enabled footswitch.
The
Gain
control on Zoar goes from the edge of break up
all the way over the cliff into the crunchy, grinding abyss.
The character of the distortion is heavily dependent on the
setting of the
Weight
control as well as your guitar’s pickup
type, and it is further fine-tuned by the EQ section.
While having its roots in a very familiar past, the passive
3-band EQ has been finely tuned for modern tones. While
this style of tone shaping seems simple on the surface, it
is deceptively complex and highly interactive. Here are
a few pointers for dialing in Zoar and learning all it has
to teach.
• If
Bass
,
Middle
and
Treble
all are zeroed out, no sound
shall pass. This is the nature of a passive EQ.
• Turning up one of the three bands will affect the other two.
• Setting all three bands in unison at noon will give you
a completely different response than setting them all
in unison at 9 o’clock, or, say 1 o’clock, 2 o’clock …
you get the idea.
See, highly interactive. A good starting point is setting
all three bands at noon and experimenting with each one
individually.
The 3-band EQ and
Gain
controls give you nearly
unlimited options with great focus and sensitive
precision, but the real powerhouse of Zoar is the
Weight
control. This control dictates the amount of low end that
is passed into the circuit, thus controlling the entire
character of the pedal. Simply dial in the 3-band EQ to
12 o’clock and adjust the
Weight
to see how drastically
it dictates your sound. From a mere clean boost to a
high gain distortion to overdrive to the crispy Hi-Fi fuzz
territory, this function gives you everything.
The
Level
control hits unity gain around noon, but this
is dependent on where the other controls are set. In
addition to controlling the output volume, it also plays
a small part in the controlling the voice of Zoar. By
adjusting the
Level
control with any combination of EQ
(boosting the frequency bands and cutting the output
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