Vox Satchurator

One of the most interesting stomp boxes I own is the Vox Satchurator:

This unit was designed by Joe Satriani and replaced his Boss DS-1 Distortion box on his pedal board. When I first tried this unit out, I set all the controls to 12 O'clock (as pictured above) and immediately got a very nice and responsive Bluesy tone. With a little tweaking of the controls, Gain almost max, Tone around 9:30, Volume around 10 O'clock, I had nailed Joe's tone. By increasing the gain to max, I got even more sustain and harmonics out of it.

This is the only Distortion box that I ever had that responded extremely well to lowering the volume on the guitar. There's no appreciable drop in Volume when you do this until you get down to around the "8" position on your guitar. Here I found a nice chunky rhythm tone and going to a lead tone was as simple as turning up the Volume again.

There are 2 other controls to explore. There's a Pad switch for when you are running a hotter effect in front of it like a Wah, and then there's the "More" button on the right. The "More" button provides exactly what it sounds like, More Distortion, Sustain and Gain. Here we start to leave the Satriani sound and move on to a heavier and more harmonic driven tone. This is helpful if you want to move away from his signature sound and explore all the various uses of this box.

Overall, I am impressed with this unit and would recommend it to any player looking for a well rounded Distortion box. Thumbs up and thank you Vox for working with Joe to get these out to the general public.

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