Hartwood Pedals | Just how good can this $30 Fuzz, Overdrive, Distortion + Chorus be?! Review & Demo

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Today we’re looking at an extremely affordable set of pedals from Hartwood: we’ve got the Santa Fe Fuzz, the Blue Ridge Overdrive, the Beartooth Distortion and the Collinsville Chorus!

Hartwood Pedals at Gear4music:

Hartwood is the Gear4Music house brand, and when they contacted me and asked if I wanted to check out these pedals, it was a quick ‘yes’. You can buy the four pedals on their own – each costs around $30/€30/£29 individually – or in a pack, which also includes a Hartwood Multi Power Supply and a set of six patch cables.

Don’t be fooled by the budget nature of these pedals, though. While you can’t expect the world’s best build quality for this price, they’re all housed in nice, solid metal enclosures and the pots and jacks all feel fairly solid and roadworthy.

The most exciting of the four pedals on paper (at least for me!) is the Beartooth, which is clone of the legendary ProCo Rat. You get the same three controls as the original Rat here – Volume, Filter (that’s your tone) and Distortion, but the Beartooth has three modes too: Normal, Turbo and Solo. Three Rat-types in one for $30? Sounds like a bargain to me!

Next up is the Santa Fe fuzz. This is a vintage 60s fuzz face-style fuzz, and it just has two knobs: Volume and Fuzz. Being a fuzz face, though, we can expect it to deliver fuzz styles from classic Hendrix and Gilmour tones, up to 21st century garage sounds a la Jack White and The White Stripes, The Black Keys, and so on.

The third drive on the menu is the Blue Ridge Overdrive, and this is based on the iconic Marshall Bluesbreaker. That means it should serve up a wide range of low and medium gain tones, and some of that much hyped transparent overdrive too! The Blue Ridge has three main controls – Volume, Gain and Tone – plus a two-way mini switch where you can choose between Normal and right modes.

Finally, we have the Collinsville Chorus. Most likely based on the Boss CE-2, the Collinsville features Volume, Speed and Depth controls to set the amount of lush chorus in your tone.

If you buy these pedals in the set, you also get Hartwood’s 12-output power supply. The power supply is made of steel and each output is individually isolated, so it should give us quiet operation at all times. You get 2.2A of power overall, and 10 9V outputs, 1 x 12V output, 1 x 18V output, plus a bonus 5V USB A output that you can use to charge your phone or power a MIDI keyboard or similar.

Finally, the set comes with six colorful patch cables to hook the pedals up.

Coming in at $163/€180/£149, this set offers a whole lot of FX pedal goodness for the money… but just how good can gear this cheap be? That’s what we’re about to find out! In the video, I put each of the four pedals through its paces in a variety of musical styles, and I also stack them together to see how they handle it.

Let me know which of the pedals you like best in the comments!

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

00:00 Hello!
00:17 Hartwood Pedals Set info
02:08 Santa Fe Fuzz info
02:40 Blue Ridge Overdrive info
03:20 Beartooth Distortion info
04:04 Collinsville Chorus info
04:21 Hartwood Power Supply info
05:50 Today’s rig and plan

07:00 Santa Fe Fuzz tones
10:17 Blue Ridge Overdrive tones
13:52 Beartooth Distortion tones
17:45 Collinsville Chorus tones
20:29 Stacking the pedals: more tones

24:38 My thoughts
25:19 Price and build quality
25:54 Santa Fe Fuzz opinions
26:43 Blue Ridge Overdrive opinions
27:46 Beartooth Distortion opinions
28:25 Collinsville Chorus opinions
29:20 Stacking pedals is always worth it
30:31 Power Supply opinions
31:34 Is the whole set worth it?
31:55 Which of these pedals should you buy?

My setup was as follows: I ran the pedals into my Hughes & Kettner Black Spirit 200 head – the drive pedals in the front end, and the chorus in the FX Loop. Then I went from the amp’s Red Box DI straight into my Focusrite Scarlett 2i4, which went into Logic Pro X. That’s it. No post-processing on the sounds was done. Here’s some links to those bits of gear:

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At Thomann:
At Sweetwater:
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Backing music from the YouTube Audio Library: Duck In The Alley – TrackTribe.

#Hartwood #HartwoodGuitars #Gear4music #HartwoodPedals

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@gear4musicguitars