blend control is located inside the box
in the form of a pot that you access by
removing the four back-plate screws. The
unit ships with a 40 percent wet/60 percent dry setting, but if you love to tinker
with tone, you’ll probably find yourself
tweaking the Blend pretty quickly. I
found the stock setting offered a cool,
well-rounded flavor for the Stratocaster
and its single-coils. The Les Paul benefit-ted from a wetter signal, however.
In the end, the Blend knob isn’t a huge
issue, especially given the other advantag-
es of a very un-huge delay unit and that
the alternative is a cluttered control set. If
your sets are built around songs that have
wildly varied delay blends from tune to
tune, Violet won’t be the best option, but
Violet excels in both it’s simplicity, ease
of operation, and the colorful breadth of
delay sounds you’ll get.
Scarlett Overdrive
Scarlett is the sienna-tinged overdrive Sister.
And while ostensibly the tamest of the three
dirtboxes in the series, Scarlett has the capacity for a guttural bark when you need it.
With the Volume at 75 percent and a Les
Paul driving the signal, Scarlett matched the
volume of the Fender Bassman’s clean tone.
And with the Gain setting at about 10 per-
cent I got a sweet smooth break-up with nice
harmonic glow. These lower settings are great
for pushing amps over the edge into warm
tube crunch for leads. Scarlett’s output doesn’t
smother the original tone of the guitar, either,
though there is a midrange emphasis that’s
common to many ODs. Rolling up the Gain
to 50 percent gave riffs a truculent swagger
and a smoky, whisky-soaked voice. Pushing
her up to full Gain sounds like an all-out bar
fight complete with razor-blade trebles and
a heavy low end. Even at this extreme set-
ting you don’t really have a distorted sound,
though—more of a true-to-form Hammer
of the Gods, big-amp tone. It seems Scarlett
stopped listening to rock in 1979 and has
some very classic tendencies to show for it.
