Based loosely on another famous green stompbox, the Earthquaker Devices Plumes Small Signal Shredder is a low to medium gain overdrive with a twist. As with any other Earthquaker pedal, this isn’t your vanilla sound.
You could easily use the Plumes as the industry standard transparent drive we all know works so well with a saturated tube amp, but it does much more than that. The natural voicing is direct and fine tuned to a tee.
Sound
You’ll get plenty of both bark and bite out the Plumes thanks to the three clipping options. Select one of symmetrical LED, asymmetrical silicon and no diode OpAmp drive, all with unique characteristics. Put simply, the former is super crunchy, silicon is closer to a clean boost and the latter creates the classic screamer tone.
Packing the familiar three Level, Tone and Gain dials, the Plumes handles as easy as anything. The Tone control has been re-imagined to help sculpt low end without losing punchy frequencies, clear top end and focus the midrange.
Electronics
The Plumes is a much friendlier and versatile pedal than similar low gain iterations. First off, it ditches a JRC4558 OpAmp and BJT buffers for low noise JFET OpAmps. This allows for a significantly lower floor noise, unlike the original’s blustery feedback.
Earthquaker have also designed the stompbox to allow for more headroom and a stronger signal to increase clarity and chime. As with all new Earthquaker pedals, the Plumes is equipped with a silent, momentary soft touch switch to activate the effect only as long as you need, and all-analogue true bypass circuitry.
Specifications
- Unique approach to a classic tube-like overdrive circuit
- Features 3 different clipping options
- Re-imagined tone control
- All-analog signal path
- Flexi-Switch™
- Silent soft-touch switching with True Bypass
- Powered by regular 9V DC PSU