Sometimes when you’re researching pedal after pedal after pedal, they all start to blur into one. It becomes hard to differentiate one pedal from another. When I started researching the pedal to add to my wishlist this week, I thought I’d been at it too long and combined several pedals into one. I was wrong though. It wasn’t me. No, Electro Harmonix (EHX) went and did that themselves when they created the Tone Tattoo.
The Tone Tattoo is a unit (or multi-effects pedal) that is a combination of the Metal Muff Distortion, Neo Clone Chorus and Memory Toy Analog Delay. That’s a wicked combination and coincidentally, the Tone Tattoo is a wicked looking pedal unit.
When I first started playing guitar in the 1980s, distortion and chorus were the first two pedals I purchased. They were the backbone behind my favourite heavy metal tones. I’ve never been a lead guitarist and therefore never really got into delay pedals. I’m appreciating them more now though, so this pedal would be very cool for me to own.
Obviously, not everybody wants to play heavy metal. I’m not sure why not, but I’ve heard this is a real thing. Luckily, the Tone Tattoo lends itself to much more than just the metal tones I’d use this pedal for. If you require proof, check out the official EHX Tone Tattoo video. It highlights quite a few different settings in the pedal (with individual and multi-effect settings).
The end of that video is brutal. In the good metal kind of way … \m/
As mentioned, this is essentially three pedals in one. The way the chain works is distortion > chorus > delay (the same way you’d set them up individually on a pedal board mostly). Each effect is awesome and of course, the distortion impresses me the most.
The Metal Muff features a noise gate and mid scoop. Crank the gain up with those two features engaged and you’ve almost created the perfect metal tones for my liking.
The chorus is much simpler with its single rate knob and depth button. The rate knob controls the modulation while the depth essentially dictates whether the chorus effect is subtle or intense.
The delay effect features four knobs—delay, feedback, gain and blend. Delay controls the delay time, feedback controls the number of echoes per note struck, blend adjusts the wet/dry noise being featured in the delay while the gain knob controls the gain going into the delay effect.
Individually these would be awesome pedals. Combined … Uber pedal.
This is week three of my article series. It seemed fitting this entry contained three effects. If this is an affordable pedal unit, it’s going to be hard to ignore.
Disclaimer: I’ve not played this guitar pedal. I have not experienced first-hand the sound or effects of this guitar pedal. That doesn’t matter. It looks awesome, it’s obviously played by winners and I want one.