The most fun any guitarist can have is experimenting with tone. This is the main reason guitar shops (and the internet) are flooded with used gear. This is even more common with players who haven’t been playing that long. They’ll buy a pedal, fiddle around with it for a week then move on to something else. Thanks to brands like Azor and Flamma, the pedal scene is overflowing with inexpensive alternatives to make that experimentation much easier. But what alternatives do players on a budget have when they’re looking for something more distinctive? Well, they’re in luck! iSet Audio just so happens to have a modern take on those classic sounds!
Not unlike many mini-pedals on the market, iSet offers near-identical clones of popular manufactures for a fraction of the price.
When I iSet reached out to me to review some of their products, I was met with a variety of pedals. From choruses to loopers and an array of distortions, this relatively young brand is stacked! But I chose a few slightly off the beaten path. A flanger, a heavy metal distortion, and what looks to be a Dumble amp clone. While just about every pedal company out there was given these sounds a try, I can honestly say, they’re much harder to nail than the traditional pedal standards.
One of the most iconic sounds in music history is the Dumble amp. It’s the epitome of boutique amplifiers. So iconic, people describe the sound by the name itself. Played by some of the world’s greatest guitarists of all time (Stevie Ray Vaughan, Carlos Santana, Dickey Betts to name a few), the Dumble is glassy, crisp, warm, and responsive. But most iconically, each player to use one sounds completely different from the other. It’s almost like the amp elevates what makes each guitarist special. Or so I’m told… Seeing as each Dumble amp has been made by hand by a single person (Alex ‘Howard’ Dumble), those things are extremely expensive. Seriously. You’d be hard-pressed to find one under $150,000!
So when I fired up iSet’s Dumbler, I really had nothing to compare it to. I’ve never been in the same room with an amp that costs as much as my house, let alone play one.
On its own merits. the Dumbler is a pretty straightforward pedal with a footswitch and 4 knobs. Volume, voice, tone, and of course, gain. The volume and gain are self-explanatory, but the voice and tone knobs really don’t act as such. Instead of bass and treble, the tone knob offers various levels of ‘crispiness’. While the voice knob is similar to a presence control, maybe with a little boost to the mids.
The sound of the pedal is pretty interesting though. It’s not a distortion or overdrive in a traditional sense. It’s more in line with a clean boost but on an amp right at the edge of breakup. If this is what the Dumble amps were famous for, I totally understand why SRV loved them so much. This Dumbler pedal is perfect for slightly dirty blues. And unlike other blues-style pedals, the iSet Dumbler plays well with either single coils or humbucking pickups!
Next up on the iSet threesome, we have the Flanger. No gimmicky names, no hints as to what it’s cloning, or even if it’s a clone of anything. Simply a flange pedal.
Flange is an effect achieved by combining two signals and gradually delaying one or both for a sweeping or swooshing sound. When applied to a distorted guitar, the effect has a very old-school jet plane vibe. I’m typically not a big fan of dramatic effects like jet planes or wild noises like that but there is a time and place for everything. For me, I think it works best on a clean guitar in a very slow setting where its subtle beauty is on full display.
The iSet Flanger is the kind of pedal that relies on the player finding proverbial sweet spots. There’s a knob for speed, one for depth, and one for color along with the traditional on/off switch. But as an added bonus, there’s a hard and soft switch that allows you to play the effect without the various swooshing. This puts it more as a chorus. This thing has a ton of range though. With the slight turn of any of the knobs, you can go from a sparkly ambient tone to near-unusable oscillation.
If you’re looking for something a little more…evil, iSet’s Heavy Metal has just what the doctor ordered.
Despite being Slayer and Exodus being among my favorite bands, I’ve never been much of a metal guitarist. As briefly discussed in the first episode of the Crushed Monocle Podcast, just about every guitarist has owned a Boss Metal Zone. But that’s pretty much where my desire for heavy tones stopped. Fortunately, the iSet Heavy Metal is much more than the infamous Metal Zone.
There’s a gain, volume, and tone as usual, but the 3-way toggle switch is the focal point on the Heavy Metal for me. In the middle position, it’s a traditional Metal Zone-style pedal (sans infamous angry bees). But in the low position, the pedal sounds nearly identical to an overdriven modern Mesa Boogie style head and cabinet. Perfect for bass-heavy detuned riffs. The high boost position goes straight for a thrash metal sound similar to what the Bay-area acts were doing in the early 80s. For something so small, it’s wild to think of how many styles of metal it’s capable of.
Classic vibes, versatility at a reasonable price is clearly the most remarkable selling point of these 3 iSet pedals.
While there is no shortage of mini-pedal brands out there making budget clones, I’m stoked there’s a brand like iSet trying their hand at sounds not usually offered in pedal form. The Heavy Metal one sounds like 3 distinctive head and cabinet stacks. The Flange is a chorus, flanger, and a sonic noisemaker rolled into one. And the Dumbler offers the sound of a particular amp rather than a stompbox. To sweeten this deal, each pedal in the review sells for or under $30 US dollars!
I doubt anyone would argue a $30 mini-pedal is a worthy alternative to a $150,000 amplifier or 3 separate metal rigs, but there really aren’t any negatives here. If you want shimmering beauty, evil thrash, or soulful blues, iSet has a pedal for each of your desires. Plus, purchasing all 3 of these particular pedals combined is cheaper than buying a single stompbox from any of the major or boutique brands out there. If you’re on a budget or just want to experiment with almost-unobtainable classic sounds, look no further than iSet Audio. They’ve got you covered!
To purchase iSet guitar pedals, please visit iSet Audio at Reverb.com
The video demonstrations in this article were created by the use of traditional means. No special effects or studio-quality audio effects. They were presented in their raw form to showcase the do-it-yourself mentality of amateur musicianship.