STONE DEAF FX
PDF- 1 PARAMETRIC
DISTORTION FILTER
BY CHARLES SAUFLEY
W-hether crusty, rich, brittle, or big as a brick house, fuzz and distortion are
heavenly sounds to many ears. But from the
day Keith Richards kicked on his Maestro
Fuzz Tone for the first blast of “Satisfaction,”
guitarists have looked for ways to shape raunchy sonics into something more individual,
musical, and malleable. Roger Mayer’s Octavia
was among the first to expand what a single
fuzz box could do by putting a little octave
brawn behind the buzz. And by the ’70s, more
adventurous manufacturers were giving players
even greater power to shape their distortion.
One of the cooler efforts of the era came
from Maestro in the form of their Maestro
Parametric Filter (MPF), a clever, clunky filter
pedal that a resourceful player could use for
everything from simple EQ to total fuzzifica-tion of their signal. It wasn’t the nastiest distortion or fuzz around, but it gave guitarists a lot
of ways to manipulate their sound.
In the years since the MPF first hit music
store shelves, 6-string adventurers, including
Alex Lifeson and Josh Homme, have used
the Maestro to sculpt their tones. Now, Stone
Deaf FX of Manchester, England, has created a sturdier and more versatile evolution of
the Maestro circuit. Despite its formidable-sounding moniker, the Stone Deaf PDF- 1
Parametric Distortion Filter proves to be a
pedal of myriad applications beyond heavy
and blazing riff-rock. Like its inspiration, the
PDF- 1 is not the most out-there fuzz or fattest
distortion. But it gives you access to sounds
that most run-of-the-mill pedals can’t deliver.
English Kraftwerk
Though we’re in a Golden Age for stomp-
boxes, a lot of great pedals suffer from looking
and feeling like everything else behind the
counter. Not the Stone Deaf PDF- 1. The cus-
tom-machined aluminum casing, top-notch
pots and switches, and stylishly engraved
3-ply plastic control panel are simultaneously
reminiscent of an Apollo capsule control panel
and the dash of a late ’60s BMW—elegant,
easy to navigate, and perceptibly well made. If
you love the way a good switch feels, you’ll dig
tinkering with the PDF- 1.
+/- 20 dB
Height switch
Clean/Dirty switch
65Hz – 3Khz
Frequency switch
Five-position
Bandwidth switch
If your amp and
guitar were feeling like
a cramped cottage, the
Stone Deaf’s clean boost
function is like adding a
sunroom on the back.
the Stone Deaf from a boost/parametric EQ to
a distortion/parametric EQ unit.
Shape Shifter
If the Stone Deaf were only a boost pedal, it
would still be an impressive and useful addition to a pedalboard. And my first experiments with the PDF- 1, in the context of a
pretty boisterous band jam, involved heavy
use of the remarkably transparent clean circuit. Running the pedal after a TS- 9 Tube
Screamer and a Pro Co Rat, and into a blackface Fender Tremolux, a Music Man HD212,
and a Fender Vibroverb demonstrated not
only how much character this pedal can lend
to your signal on its own, but how much it
can help you tailor otherwise ordinary overdrive and distortion signals.
With the Stone Deaf set to clean, the
Height to approximately + 5 dB, the bandwidth
to Fat, and the frequency to about 3 o’clock,
the signal from both a toaster pickup-equipped
Rickenbacker 330 and an E-series Fender
Stratocaster took on a wide, lively, full-spec-trum character. The tones displayed a sort of
natural compression more akin to the output
