Wampler Sovereign Distortion

[borrowedworld]

After owning one for a little over a month and using it in various applications, I feel compelled to share my thoughts and experiences with it. I bought it on a whim after a friend suggested it for a versatile distortion that I could use with lots of different amps and guitars, for very disparate kinds of music. I had heard a lot of good things about Wampler so I decided to try it out, and ended up taking it home.

I have since played it in both practice and show volume situations, with my personal guitar (A Mexican Tele with Vintage Noiseless pickups and an active mid boost) as well as Les Paul's, and an Ibanez Artist. Amp-wise, I have used it with An AC30, a Blues Jr, a solid state practice amp I have at home, a Marshall Dsl-1 and a 6l6 equipped Peavey head through a Mesa 2X12, to test it through a tube amp with a lot of clean headroom.

Overall, it's super responsive to both the amp and tweaking the settings of the pedal. The setup is pretty simple but leaves a lot of options. Volume and Gain are self explanatory, a Tone knob filters the highs, and a 'Mid Behavior' knob shapes the middle frequencies, and allows you to really dial in your tone and tighten things up a bit when needed.

Topping the controls off are two mini toggles, one is for switching between two gain stages within the pedal. The standard mode is capable of an almost clean boost on through to Classic Rock overdrive and crunch sounds. The 'Boost' mode has a lot more gain, maybe more than some will need. However, it is never 'fizzy' sounding. Dynamics are great and even open chords are completely audible at high gain settings. The second toggle is for a 'Bright' or 'Even' mode, allowing you to make the pedal more friendly to either single coil or humbucker equipped guitars.

The pedal shined through every tube amp I have used it with. You can use it for pretty much any dirt application you can think of. You can thicken up your amp distortion or just boost volume , or turn a sparkling clean channel into a very unique high gain tone, pretty much giving you another channel. Tweaking it is never frustrating, something I'm really thankful for. After searching for a long time for an easy to use, awesome sounding distortion, I finally found it. I'm sorry if this came off as too much of a review of it, but I wanted to share and give my recommendation.


TL;DR version; go and try one out if you have the scratch for it and a tube amp! it doesn't sound like it could through a solid state amp! Now i really want to try his other pedals!