UBANGI STOMP™ Drive box by Nocturne Brain

Tavo Vega’s take a late 70’s White Label bud box Rat pedal & tweak its values and components so when you turn up your old fullerton era amp or vintage brit plexi, you can keep the inherent twang and jangle of your telecaster or hollowbody gretsch/guild but harness that grindy tube clip at decent volume.

This boutique pedal is using silver mica,tantalum caps, metal film resistors, as well as switchcraft jacks for a solid american build. There’s an internal trimmer for controlling gain on the low mids end (you can flatten the low mids nicely or snark em), and a socketed *vintage 60’s NOS Metal can LM308AH Operational Amp (pre-dates the plastic chip version and its cork sniffing qualities are sweeter IMO).

There’s even a position switch inside so you can chose Missionary or Pagan position! 🙂 Missionary is classic tight compressed response (symmetrical clipping) and Pagan is unconventionally loose and uncompressed more bite (asymmetrical clipping)

From Tavo Vega:
To be forthright what inspired it all in the first place for me was when the Straycats were playing in Europe back in 81′ at Rockpalast and Setzer (mentioned for educational purposes only, I have no affiliation w Setzer, STP, Vox, Boss, EH, or Straycats both are registered trademarks) had to use an EH Memory man delay instead of his then boss analog delay w his blonde bassman amp w an unorthodox vox 212 cab instead of his bassman cab he normally played through and still does. Anyway it changed his sound in a cool way, it was very punk rock but still twangy clean w dirty edges. What a sound!

So.. Somewhere in the 2008’ees by accident I had a broke down R*t pedal I needed to fix and used the parts I had on hand.. The gain intensity was different, as was the attack and the guitar stayed in the mix better and it totally reminded me of that sound I just mentioned from the Cats live show. Then I plugged it into my tele and I was gettin my fav STP “tripping on hole” tone w it when I turned the gain up another few numbers. Anyway you get the point.. Its got a cleaner response w a sweeter EQ, chords hang like over ripe fruit or chubby pinecones (depending on your amp settings) from the tree ..or something like that when you keep the gain down and the output up. You can crank the gain and use the tone filter for full gnar weeze tones or smash your pumpkin too but thats not the point on this build. Lets carve the woody clean-dirty sounds on this Tiki, add your favorite reverb or delay and stomp.

My main pedalboard is finished (for now).

Main Pedalboard Feb 2019