Guardians of the analog
Well-known member
- Build Rating
What is one of the most polarizing distortion boxes ever? It's associated with many bands that are equally polarizing and it's one of the best selling distortion pedals of the past 30 years. The other end of the boss metal sound...the Metal Zone. If the HM-2 were heads on a coin, the MT-2 would definitely be tails on that coin. There are so many bad examples of this pedal and it's written off so much, but why? It's like the limp Bizkit of metal pedals and like many things in this collection I'm working on I have to ask is it better than I remember it back in the late 90s?
The metal zone is like someone at boss was dared to make the most over the top stompbox and they simply said hold my beer. The amount of gain is ridiculous and I think that's why people hate it so much. The key imo is to not max the gain out. You could run it at 9 o clock and still have gain for days. The EQ is the other problem. It's powerful and has so much control over shaping the sound that people don't take the time to learn how to use it effectively. Boss pedals are notorious for having the reputation of setting everything at noon and you get a great sound, and this is not that. Diming everything like a. HM-2 and it seems like a lot of people think this will work on the MT-2 but that's not the case. So many sounds are available in this box that between this and the HM-2 I could get any heavy sound I want.
What it's not...not heavy. You want something that can do low gain, crunch and high gain? This ain't it. This is metal zone 100% of the time. I think with taking the time to sculpt the EQ and exploring the lower ranges of the gain pot this is a versatile high gain pedal that has so many great sounds as well as an equal amount of terrible ones. In the end, I highly recommend this if you want the chug and will take the time to tune it to your rig, or you want a box of angry bees.
The build itself was simple minus one issue, albeit an easy fix. In typical guitarpcbmania fashion there was an error, the gain pot is working in reverse. Would have been nice to have this documented.I simply wired the pot in reverse and the gain pot now works as it should. Also, I couldn't find a 50kb dual gain pot so I used a 100k dual gang and used parallel resistors to drop it to 50k on each gang The noise floor is better than the original and the circuit has tons of mods available that are documented in the build doc. Also I wired the optional clipping switch for just stock silicon. All in all a straight forward build that had one hiccup. Matte dark grey tayda box with simple UV print. Went with Hella to match the Nordic metal name and the goddess of the death had the vibe of the sound as well.
In spite of the guitarpcbmania issue and their reputation I will recommend this project if you want to build a metal zone, if all else because it's the only board available for the project as far as I know. I give this a 4.5 star rating because of the issue, and it sounds great in spite of that so build it, or request one from @Robert which is the more sensible thing to do.
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