TC Electronic Magus Pro | 3 great-sounding Rat circuits in one tiny box for $80/€80? Review & Demo

Подробнее о видео

This is the TC Electronic Magus Pro distortion/overdrive/fuzz pedal – an extremely tiny and remarkably affordable take on the iconic Rat circuit!

Get the Magus Pro here:

Pretty much every guitar player will be familiar with the legendary ProCo Rat pedal. Since its original release in 1979, guitarists of every shape and size have used the Rat – and now the modern-day Rat 2 – to turn their clean tones into raging walls of thick distortion, tight overdrives, and even sputtery fuzzes. It’s an incredibly versatile pedal, and still loved 40+ years on.

This also explains why many other builders make their own versions of the Rat. The Magus Pro actually contains three Rat-type sounds, offering Classic, Fat and Turbo modes. Classic mode gives you that classic Rat sound, while Fat mode boosts low end and revoices the mids, and the Turbo mode adds two LED clipping diodes into play, delivering more headroom, less saturation and a big boost in volume.

Apart from that, it’s a simple pedal, with Gain, Volume and Filter controls. The Magus Pro is also tiny, like a chunky mini pedal, and it features top mounted jacks, so it’s designed to fit into the smallest possible space on your pedalboard.

At under $80/€80, this seems like a lot of pedal for the money… but how does it hold up? That’s what we’re going to find out! In the video, I put the Magus Pro through its paces in as many different musical genres as I can, from pop and blues to indie, classic rock, punk, metal, and more.

Using my Fender Telecaster for single coil tones, and my humbucker-equipped Epiphone Les Paul, I also try the pedal into a dirty amp, and I also do a couple of loops with the pedal to test the extremes with the settings. Finally, I have a little bonus loop for you where I run the Magus Pro up against the classic ProCo Rat 2 to see how similar – or different – they sound.

Here are some links to the various playing samples and info bits:

00:00 Hello!
00:14 Introduction to the TC Electronic Magus Pro
01:27 Pedal controls and features
03:45 Today’s rig and plan

04:55 Clean reference tones and turning on the Magus Pro
05:56 60s rock rhythm tone
06:07 Blues progression
06:29 Ascending droning indie chords
06:42 Indie rock barre chords
07:06 Southern rock arpeggios
07:16 Garage rock riff
07:32 Indie octave chords riff
07:57 Kings Of Leon riff
08:09 Fat indie rhythm chords
08:38 Airbourne inspired rock riff
09:00 AC/DC inspired inspired classic rock riff
09:15 The Darkness riff – I Believe In A Thing Called Love
09:34 Groovy classic rock riff
10:00 Hendrix inspired classic rock riff
10:16 Classic rock riff
10:38 Classic fuzz rock tone – all controls on 10
10:57 Classic hard rock riff
11:15 Hard rock melodic lead
11:37 Hard rock riff
11:53 Glam rock riff
12:09 Foo Fighters inspired modern rock riff
12:26 Alternative rock riff
12:50 Nirvana inspired grunge riff – gain maxed
13:18 Pop punk riff
13:43 Less Than Jake inspired punk riff
13:55 Punk rock power chords
14:08 Modern rock palm-muted power chords
14:31 Progressive rock riff
14:46 Rage Against The Machine inspired groovy riff
15:02 Metal chugging riff
15:19 Heavy metal lead sound
15:34 Mastodon inspired metal riff with country twang
15:46 Hardcore punk riff
16:01 Rammstein inspired industrial metal riff
16:15 Classic metal/sludge riff

16:51 Magus Pro as boost into an overdriven amp
17:32 Cleaning up the tone with the guitar’s volume control

18:25 Fender Telecaster indie rock loop
23:28 Epiphone Les Paul classic rock loop
27:07 Magus Pro vs ProCo Rat 2 loop

31:00 My thoughts
31:34 Sounds and versatility discussion
33:17 The three different modes
33:55 The Magus Pro vs the Rat 2
34:28 Other things I like: build quality, size, top mounted jacks
35:20 What I don’t like
36:29 What other Rat options are out there?
37:53 My conclusions on the Magus Pro and why you should buy it
38:45 Thanks and goodbye

My setup was as follows: I ran the Magus Pro into my Hughes & Kettner Black Spirit 200 head. That went from the amp’s Red Box DI straight into my Focusrite Scarlett 2i4, which went into Logic Pro X. No post-processing on the sounds was done. I used my Boss RC-10R to play the loops.

Here’s some links to those bits of gear:

-----
H&K Black Spirit 200 head:
Boss RC-10R Rhythm Loop Station:
Focusrite 4i4 (the new 2i4):
-----

Enjoy!



-----
Backing music from the YouTube Audio Library: Duck In The Alley – Track Tribe.

#TCElectronic #OverdrivePedal #MagusPro #RatPedal #ProCoRat LM308


*Note: certain links in the description are affiliate links. If you click said links and purchase anything as a result, I will receive a small commission. This doesn’t cost you anything extra, but it does help to support the channel. So, if you do that, thank you very much!*

@tcelectronic