Based in Montreal (the Canadian city hosting this weekend’s Stompbox Exhibit!) Ground Control Audio is a small boutique pedal manufacturer that is getting more and more attention for its quality, hand made effects, so far exclusively focused on gain related designs: the company is currently offering three pedals tackling boost, overdrive and distortion.
The Amaterasu is a no frills, bright pre-amp designed to give presence and an extra push to your tone when needed. Besides the obvious gain knob, a toggle switch lets you boost the tone’s brightness.
Their take on overdrive, called Blood Oath, is presented as a “low to mid gain overdrive” and offers a lot more flexibility, including tone control and an independent pre-gain stage (with its on knob and footwsitch), which basically allows for two overdrive modes.
The distortion pedal, called Locust, is described as something that:
…pushes discrete silicon amplification into loud and sluggish distortion territory. The two mid-notch depth modes and tone controls will enable you to dial in ear-piercing highs for lead parts just as well as deep, dark and swarmy growls for heavy rhythmic riffing while, on low gain modes, the Locust will still give you solid, warm overdriven tones.
That sounds intriguing!
Another cool thing this manufacturer started in 2017 is a series of blog posts featuring educational posts about electrical engineering applied to stompboxes. Aspiring pedal designers should check it out.
 Hear/see the video Ground Control Audio pedal demos by clicking on the images below.
