Supercool Pedals is aptly named, with the Canadian guitar effects pedal company specialising in smart twists on pedalboard classics.
It’s done Big Muffs, rolled up Small Clone-style BBD-driven chorus/vibrato, and even reinterpreted the Klon Centaur overdrive pedal as the Dr Seuss-inspired Thneed, but now it is the turn of the ProCo Rat to be reborn anew as The Barstow Bat.
And you could probably think of these pedals has having a similar evolutionary and taxonomical context as the rat and the bat; after all, what is a bat if not a rat with wings? And what is The Barstow Bat, if not a Rat with an expanded feature set, including a powerful three-band EQ, switchable clipping at the touch of the Turbo button, and twice the output of the original?
This is a Rat reimagined. But of course you have on-the-money Rat tones should you want them. Start with all the EQ dials at noon and you’ve that got stock Rat response. But with boost and cut from the Low, Mid and High knobs, you can really take control of your electric guitar (or bass guitar) tone.
Supercool is releasing The Barstow Bat in two editions. There is a stock white version, which has knobs for Drive and Level plus the 3-band EQ, and a top-mounted Turbo button for switching the clipping from silicon to a pair of LEDs that give you a bit more midrange muscle and gain – a little like the original ProCo Turbo Rat, it’ll give you twice as much output, more than enough to make your guitar amp, or whatever preamp or gain pedals you have in front of it, really scream.
The limited edition black version, meanwhile, features the same complement of controls, but also features some rare NOS Germanium 1n34a diodes, which can be activated for the Turbo mode via an internal dip-switch. We like the sounds of this.
An even-more versatile Rat variant is quite the prospect. Even a plain old stock Rat is an exemplary pedal, one of the most hardworking (and hard-clipping) distortion pedals you can put on your pedalboard.
It can be used for adding some overdriven bite to blues guitar break-up. It has that certain something that makes a superb choice for spiky indie, post-rock and post-punk alike.
And there’s an inherent animalism to a Rat that gives it a quasi-fuzz tone when you really jack it up – a Rat, a Marshall amp, and an HSS Stratocaster and you have Trevor Peres of Obituary’s death metal guitar tone.
And heck, you can even use it as a tone-sweetener just to make things sound better; the Rat is Nuno Bettencourt’s secret weapon, always on, running it with all the gain down, literally doing nothing except tightening up the bass response so that his single-note lines have a bit more width. All this and more is on the menu with The Barstow Bat.
“Carefully designed to add masterfully crafted saturation, distortion, and tone to your guitar, bass, (or any other instrument your imagination can conjure up), The Barstow Bat can create a wide range of sonic paths and landscapes,” writes Supercool, “ranging from searing distortions, to natural overdrives, crunchy leads, and dirty boosts, with loads of gain and signature style.”
Clever, but then Bats, like Rats, are intelligent animals. The Barstow Bat it is available now, with both versions priced $205. See Supercool Pedals for more details.
