by vaughn skow January 27, 2014 3 min read
I’ve managed to collect some seriously cork-sniffer level gear over the last few decades, but make no mistake: I am absolutely NOT a gear-snob. No way. Not even a little bit. My philosophy is this: a piece of gear is fully awesome if it does what you need it to, and does it well … regardless of price. So, using that convention, let’s talk monkey … BAD Monkey!
I’m a Tube Screamer guy. Oh sure, I dig Fuzz tones and straight-up distortion on certain tunes, but it’s the ubiquitous mid-heavy tube tone of the Tube Screamer type pedals that serve as my go-to dirt pedals. Over the decades, I’ve owned almost every T-S type pedal ever produced, from the original 808’s and Maxon’s to the cheap knock-offs, to the modern boutique re-creations. The one that has found a permanent (for now) place on both of my gigging pedal boards is the under-rated Digitech Bad Monkey. Now, for those of you out there who really AREgear snobs (or at least pedal snobs), I’m sure you find this to be utter heresy, so please, let me explain. Here are my reasons:
Okay, so there are a few caveats I should mention:
A final thought: Like darn-near every pedal out there, there are several mods available for the Bad Monkey. To my ears, none of them really improve the tone … again IF you actually LIKE the TS-808 sound, so I recommend you just forgo them. However, if you replace the LED with some alternative color and put some kind of a “modded” sticker on it … then caveat #4 becomes null-and-void :-)
Here is my #2 pedal board, used exclusively for playing direct with in-ear monitors. It's quite a mix of high-end, mid-range, and downright inexpensive pedals ... with the Bad Monkey most certainly in the latter catagory!
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