my vfe pinball v3 pedal arrived over the weekend. did some test runs today... this one has earned a permanent spot on my pedalboard. normally i would just cover the pedal on a post when i finish the pedalboard build next month, but as vfe pedals are very rare, and a few are still available on reverb, i thought i'd give you an early look at great tone sculpter. so if you're a pedal-head looking for a great boost or tone equalizer pedal, read on...

first, about vfe...

1. peter rutter, founder of vfe pedals, is a school teacher. he seldom builds pedals anymore, but when he does, it is usually during school break, and the proceeds go mostly toward buying electronic supplies for class.
   

2. after filling custom orders, peter builds out several models with the remaining parts and sells them on his reverb store. there were still a few from this last round of builds on his store when last i checked.

3. vfe pedals are born out of the diy community... you can buy the plans for any pedal and build it yourself. each of the designs is based on a famous pedal, and the vfe version is usually better than the original. i have a mini-mu, with is an improved version of the original mutron envelope filter. the vfe mini-mu is the best envelope filter pedal i've used.

what's different about the pinball v3 tilt/bump? you are probably familiar with typical band equalizers, whether a graphic equalizer with sliders, or the standard bass/mid/treble knobs on many amps. these eq's operate at a fixed frequency, and you adjust how much of that frequency can pass to the output. the pinball v3 pedal is a different type of parametric eq,.. with the amount of signal cut being fixed at 6 or 12db, but the frequency is adjustable.

this pedal has two modes: bump and tilt. bump is essentially a booster with the high and low pass filters being applied serially. in this mode, the mix knob blends wet and dry. in tilt mode, the high and low pass filters are run in parallel, and the blend knob blends between the two filters.

as a boost, the pinball imparts it's own pleasant character to the tone that is on par with xotic's ep boost but with an eq to boot. as an eq., it is on par with the empress paraeq for quality, but with fewer sculpting options, in either mode, the pedal does a great job of responding to pickups.

aside from the obvious uses of sculpting tone, one of my favorite uses for these types of pedals is to filter out low frequencies before delay pedals (which can otherwise muddy the bass), or removing high frequencies so a vibe pedal only modulates the bass... and if you have a good fx loop mixer you can blend dry with a phase inverted signal to yeild two signal paths split by frequency.

pros:

1. 100% analog

2. noiseless, anti-pop foot switch

3. high quality components

4. easy to dial in great tones

cons:

1. no midi support

2. no presets

3. no expression pedal control

4. no control of q shape

5. can only set 6 or 12 db cut

costs about $230.

note: if you're looking to get stereo separation from a single guitar (especially acoustic) in a live setting, you will want a differnt type of eq... you will need a stereo 10-band slider eq. with expression pedal support (to adjust the stereo separation for strumming vs. single note). something on par with the boss eq-200 works great for that.