Whenever we get pedals coming to us from halfway around the world, it’s always interesting to see the new and exciting ways used to create effects through the minds of builders in other countries. Today’s featured pedal is the flagship effects from Ratin Pedals in Munich, Germany, a country which seems to keep putting out more and more killer effects each year. The Blue Angel Overdrive is an original design, three-gain stage drive designed to produce rich and harmonic sustain with ease – let’s check it out!
First off, this pedal is bigger than most stompboxes in this category, somewhere between a Boss-sized pedal and a Butler Tube Overdrive. Tone, Level and Drive make up the main controls, and all functions as they do on most overdrive pedals, boasting a wide range on each control and creating some great and solid tones all on their own. The real magic elements in the Blue Angel take place via two tone-shaping toggle switches, Fat and Dynamic.
The Fat switch fattens up the sound before the guitar signal hits the overdrive circuit, especially when using thin-sounding pickups. The Dynamic switch lets you choose between 3 different dynamic ranges: Middle (wide and open, more presence in the low and top-end, more touch sensitive), Up (compressed, gritty and more sustain) and Down (limits the dynamic range compared to the mid position, but with more sustain and edge and yet a bit softer overall). Each one of these presents a different type of character and sound, and interacts accordingly with the three main control knobs.
The main thing is that the Blue Angel has a nice-sounding name, but is a big beast once you engage that footswitch. From a nice crispy boost to a warm and inviting overdrive to a full-on powerhouse of sound, it is at times both gentle and aggressive, two aspects that cannot be stated about every dirt pedal out there, for sure. Thanks so much to the crew at Ratin Pedals for sending this guy all the way from Germany, we’re hoping they come out with another rad pedal in the near future, so we can check it out as well.
Specs:
Dynamic response
Completely versatile in creating varieties of tones
True bypass , to maintain the clearest signal possible
Equipped with Fat switch to fatten up the sound
3 position Dynamic switch for different tastes of overdrive and varieties of color tones
Capable of producing sparkling clean to heavy crunch
3 stages of saturation and clipping (just like a tube amp) to make a fat and harmonicly rich sound
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