MAD PROFESSOR
GOLDEN CELLO
BY TYLER GREEN
As far as stompbox names go, “Golden Cello” is a lot to live up to—
evoking thoughts of singing, harmonically rich
tones, muted heavenly light, and a prized
relic from antiquity perhaps. There’s just no
way your mind’s eye won’t weave some very
grand ideas about how it’s going to sound.
In concept, the Golden Cello is aptly
named. It’s designed to deliver big, singing overdrive with high-quality, tape-echo-type delay from a compact pedal—which
certainly sounds like a recipe for golden
tone. And if doesn’t quite summon the
strains of some celestial chamber quartet,
it’s a powerful pedalboard tool of deliciously varied capabilities.
Heart of Gold
For all the tone-massaging capabilities it
delivers, the Golden Cello makes do with
just four main controls—delay, drive, volume, and tone. There’s more going on than
meets the eye, however. Pop open the hood
and there are four tiny holes on the PCB.
They’re labeled gain, delay 1, repeat, and
delay 2, and they yield access to trim pots
for additional delay tweaks.
In the Golden Cello’s manual, the user
is advised to exercise extreme caution when
opening the pedal to make adjustments,
because it’s easy to disturb the electronics
and damage the pedal—a truth I discovered
first hand: After opening the pedal, adjusting the trim pots, and gingerly replacing the
cover, the pedal came to life and promptly
died when I moved my chair to assume a
better playing position.
It was hard to determine the exact reason
for the intermittent signal, but I did discover that the delay section’s circuit board
can make unwanted contact between the
solder connections and the back plate of
the pedal—contacts that ground the circuit
and interrupt the signal. That means aligning the back plate before screwing it back
together has to be done very carefully.
With this in mind, it’s hard not to
wonder how the pedal might fare in a
Single top-mounted
delay knob
jostling, unventilated tour van traveling
through climates that could have drastic
extremes in temperature and humidity—because you’re definitely not going
to want to find out in the middle of a
gig that, since the last show, those delay-circuit connections have been jostled into
contact with the rear plate. For a builder
of pro-grade gear like Mad Professor, it’s
surprising the pedal isn’t a little more bulletproof. (Mad Professor’s John Pegler tells
us this design flaw has since been fixed.)
That said, the circuit design is admirably ambitious. It isn’t easy to cram such a
fine-sounding overdrive with two separate
delay circuits into a single chassis. And
it’s pretty clear that the circuit is designed
with careful consideration for component
selection, including the venerable Princeton
Technologies PT2399 chip. Though it’s
digital, it does a great job of emulating
to hear audio clips of the pedal at
premierguitar.com/aug2012
CLICKHere…
Tone, drive, and
volume knobs for
overdrive section
Internal delay-parameter pots
tape- and bucket-brigade-delay tones in a
very small and efficient circuit.
The Midas Touch
To test the Golden Cello, I used a ’60s
Gibson Firebird with P-90s and a Fender
Lone Star Stratocaster, both routed via
the Golden Cello into a ’60s Fender Twin
Reverb and played at volumes ranging from
quiet to near meltdown.
Using the Firebird’s neck pickup, I
dialed in thick, heavy distortion with
a touch of delay, which enabled me to
paint with some very bold brushstrokes.
The pedal has a liquid, sustaining distortion that seems capable of lingering for
days—just as the name implies. But it can
also get quite biting for leads when you
crank the distortion and tone all the way
up. There’s also enough gain to drive a
Twin’s speakers to a husky bark. At more
