Shootout - Shredmaster vs Jackhammer vs Hyde

monquixote

http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b197/monquixote/IMAG0085_zps46f2d6d7.jpg

I've been on a quest for quite a while for a heavyish rock drive that works into a spanky clean amp. 

I mostly play clean funky stuff, but often I need to punctuate something with a big rock riff, or switch to a rock solo sound. 

I've tried lots and lots of pedals with varying degrees of success, but the one that has really floated my boat has been the vintage 90's Shredmaster. Being the GAS fiend that I am that hasn't stopped me from buying pedals of course so recently I've acquired both a Visual Sound Son of Hyde and a Marshall Jackhammer. 

Why you may ask?

The Son of Hyde is rumoured to be a clone of the Shredmaster and the Jackhammer is the pedal that replaced it and often receives rave reviews. Both are smaller, considerably cheaper secondhand and known to be pretty reliable (which the Shredmaster isn't). Maybe one of these young upstarts can impress me enough to replace it on my board. 

So first up I suppose I'd better explain what it is I actually like about the Shredmaster. Well despite it's name it's not really a very Shreddy pedal. The gain level is pretty tame by the standards of a modern rock oriented pedal let alone something targeted at metal fiends. It's a very badly named pedal all round as it came out in the middle of grunge and found favour with Radiohead, Supergrass, My Bloody Valentine and Rage Against The Machine. 

It's not massively versatile from a gain perspective as below noon it really doesn't sound that great and seems to get quite woofy and muddy, but take it beyond that and you get a nice chunky rock distortion. It's not as overtly a distortion as a DS1 or a RAT, but it's not really an "amp in a can" in my book. 

The bass control is pretty powerful and really gives you a lot of chunk on the low strings. I used it for a dep gig where I had to do Basketcase and it was perfect. If you turn it up too high it gets out of control pretty fast and cranked it's probably a good bedroom sound, but made my amp get farty at gig volume. 

The treble control is usable, but doesn't have a huge sweep. It's quite a dark pedal so I expect a lot of people will have it pretty high along with the volume which is old school in that to get any decent level of boost it needs to be almost on full. 

The contour control works backwards from a regular mid control and is where the magic happens. From memory I think it's voiced pretty similar to the one on the old Valvestates and goes from a 90's scoop to a rock rhythm sound to a nicely mid boosted lead sound that cuts really well. 

So there you have it: big, expensive and not especially versatile, but what it does do sounds bloody fantastic. 

I've already written loads so I'll do the comparison in my next post. 

guitarfishbay

Hurry up I need to pick up my g/f soon!

monquixote

guitarfishbay said:

Hurry up I need to pick up my g/f soon!

Might be a few minutes yet as I haven't written the second bit. 

dindude

While we're waiting for monx, can anyone explain how Visual Sound managed to design a bespoke enclosure that looks so dreadful?

monquixote

Right onwards to part two!

Several sources online suggest that the Son of Hyde is a Shredmaster clone (although some people have told me point blank that it isn't). Several things point to it not being an exact clone namely that it has no bass control, a conventional mid control (unlike the turn up to cut mids contour), a bright switch, the VS pure bypass buffer and a built in noise gate. 

Plug and play, everything at 12 and first impressions are, too much bass!

A quick squint at the manual suggests it does infact have a bass control, but it's on an internal trim pot and by default it's set to full!

Knowing the Shredmaster's bass heavy nature this seems like a bit of a silly idea. Screwdriver and tweaker in hand I pop open the case and turn it back to halfway (turning off the gate at the same time). This seems to make it quite bass light compared to the Marshall at noon where I have it so I A/B it until it's about the same (suggesting they have at the very least a different taper on the bass pot).

Now it's a lot closer. The VS is quieter at high gain and has more boost and a bit more distortion available though like the Shredmaster it's not at it's best at lower gains.

WIthout having access to the circuit diagram I'm pretty sure it is essentially a Shredmaster, but not a clone as such and that VS engineers haven't been scared to tweak things where it suits them. As a result it sounds very similar, but certainly isn't exactly the same. That's not a problem as long as it also sounds awesome, and the good news is that it does. Back to back I still think I marginally prefer the Shredmaster, but I'm not sure if that's familiarity and mojo rather than the objective reality. 

I should mention the bright switch which seems to take a filter cap out of circuit. Much like the DIII I reviewed a while back the Hyde and Shredmaster seem to have something acting as some kind of low pass filter which rolls off frequencies above the treble control. This is probably why it is so popular with people who use bright amps (like Radiohead's Fender Twins) because a high frequency roll off typically stops pedals sounding fizzy. Clicking it to bright adds more of a conventional distortion pedal character which is much nastier (in a good way) and would probably be better for pushing a dirty amp. 

Will it replace the Shredmaster on my board?

The answer is currently "Not sure" it's going to take a bit more testing before I decide, but I'd definitely encourage anyone looking for a Shredmaster sound to consider a Hyde as it's a cheaper and more practical alternative. 

Next up the Jackhammer!

monquixote

dindude said:

While we're waiting for monx, can anyone explain how Visual Sound managed to design a bespoke enclosure that looks so dreadful?

They are ugly as fook, but they are easy to read on stage and you don't kick the knobs which puts them ahead of most manufacturers. 

Flanging_Fred

Bit cheeky this but..
Do you have the battery door for the Shredmaster? If you do can you take photo of it and post it on the forum? My battery door is missing on mine (common occurance) and I wouldn't mind fashioning some kind of replacement. A photo of an original would be most useful.

Enjoying your review, it's good stuff. I must say that I rather like the Shredmaster with the gain low at about 3.

monquixote

Flanging_Fred said:

Bit cheeky this but..
Do you have the battery door for the Shredmaster? If you do can you take photo of it and post it on the forum? My battery door is missing on mine (common occurance) and I wouldn't mind fashioning some kind of replacement. A photo of an original would be most useful.

Enjoying your review, it's good stuff. I must say that I rather like the Shredmaster with the gain low at about 3.

Surprise, surprise it's busted on mine as well!

It may be that there are some good sounds to be had at lower gains with the EQ tweaked a bit. I was quite surprised how changing the gain seems to alter the frequency response so it's possible I haven't got the best out of it. I tend to set and forget once things are on my gig board. 

PolarityMan

I had a shredmaster in the 90s. It was great!

You're band on the money with the grunge thing, at that point in time I was listening to metal but lacked the ability to play well it so the shredmaster worked pretty well for me.

Actually trying to buy a jackhammer in the early 2000s lead to my best accidental discovery ever. Basically I had by this point sold my guitar amps and bought a really cheap shitty PA so I could run some backing tracks through it for a short lived industrial project.

When I got to uni i joined a more traditional rocky band (with a drummer) and we started rehearsing in practice studios rather than just garages etc. Anyway I went into a music shop looking for a jackhammer because i remembered how much i used to like the shredmaster and the amps in the rehearsal studio's footswitches were always fucked and I ended up coming out with my sansamp GT-2 which has ever since been my absolutely all time favourite pedal.

Anyway, enough of my ramblings but you brought back some serious nostalgia for me there.

monquixote

Right third and final review 

Finally we come to the wildcard of the Jackhammer. The Jackhammer is unquestionably not a Shredmaster, but it is the pedal that Marshall chose to replace it with which makes it an interesting comparison. 

While the Visual Sound can be had secondhand for half of the price of a vintage Shredmaster the Jackhammer is around a quarter of the price making it quite a tempting proposition and a fairly cheap pedal to play about with. 

Some people disparage the little Marshall pedals because they are cheap, but they are unquestionably superb value for money and very well made. 

The main difference between the Jackhammer and the other two is that it is a two mode pedal with Distortion and OD settings. I assumed that the distortion would be the closer of the two to the Shredmaster, but it turned out that the OD was not only the closer sounding of the two modes, but also far better sounding. The Distortion is quite heavy and dark and very compressed. Not something I would ever use. It's possible there might be some decent tones hiding in there, and I'll update if I'm able to coax them out, but for now it's a conditional thumbs down. 

Switching over to the OD. I set everything on 12 and played a chord. I kid ye not that I involuntarily said "Holy shit". It's one of the chunkiest drive pedals I've ever heard with insane amounts of bass. I immediately pulled it right back to virtually nothing and even at 9 it's bassier than the Shredmaster on 12 and that is in itself is a very bassy pedal. 

As an aside I read the manual for the Jackhammer as it's quite complex knobwise to see what the recommended settings were and nearly all of them have the bass on full. This suggests the person who wrote said manual had been abusing meth or some other psychoactive compound as even with bass on 12 I suspect turning it up to gig levels would probably have damaged my amp such were the levels of low end on display. 

The other controls are treble and contour as per the Shredmaster, but with the addition of a freq knob which shifts the mid range frequency the contour centers on. Reading the manual it confirms that it is indeed the contour circuit from the Valvestate amps (so yay me for my earlier guess)

Trying to get this on a compact pedal means that all of the pots are stacked other than the OD/DIst knob which makes them fiddly to use. I wish they had put the switch somewhere else and given the pedal its own dedicated gain and volume like the Guv+ (or just not bothered with the dist mode). When compared to the other two pedals (look at the pic at the top of the page) you can see you have no idea what the settings are by looking at the pedal. 

The ability to move the center frequency of the midrange makes the EQ section very powerful and like a Mesa it takes some dialing in. I imagine these pedals typically get bought by beginners who have a lot of trouble dialing them in, they certainly aren't plug and play. 

Compared to the Shredmaster the OD has quite a lot more gain and level on tap and it is usable through all of it (but this is possibly because it doesn't go as low as the SM. Soundwise it's definitely not the same pedal, but it does appear to be in the same ballpark so I wouldn't be surprised if it was a revision of the old circuit to adapt it to the tastes of the late 90's when it was developed. 

So far it's been my least favorite of the three pedals, but it's also the fiddliest to dial in and perhaps I need more time with it. If I sound a bit negative in this part of the review then don't forget that the Shredmaster is my favorite rock pedal so it's getting some tough competition up against it. 

I think if you have an amp that doesn't do heavy and you want a huge rock sound to piss around with then it's probably the best £20-30 quid you could drop on ebay. 

ICBM

I like the Jackhammer's distortion mode - I actually prefer it to the overdrive - but you have to dial it in totally differently from the overdrive and if anything it's even more fussy, so you certainly can't use it as a two-mode pedal live. The fiddly stacked knobs are the major bugbear of all these little Marshall pedals - they're also quite easily broken. It would have probably been better if they'd just made two separate pedals, really.

monquixote

There probably are some decent sounds hidden in there, but they aren't the ones I'm looking for so I didn't fiddle too much. 

It does sound very dark and very 90's so I would probably have guessed that you would like it much more than me. 

ICBM

monquixote said:

It does sound very dark and very 90's so I would probably have guessed that you would like it much more than me. 

lol

I've actually moved on a bit these days … I caught myself saying to someone the other day that an amp had "too much bass".

monquixote

If anything has too much bass it's the Jackhammer I thought my amp was going to explode. 

I'm wondering if we should suggest a new scale on Guitarist where instead of a 5* system it's rated from Monq to ICBM. 

shuikit

dindude said:

While we're waiting for monx, can anyone explain how Visual Sound managed to design a bespoke enclosure that looks so dreadful?

I have a couple VS pedals, yes they're ugly but they're solid and reduce the chances of kicking the knobs. Interestingly the newer VS pedals have gone to a more conventional enclosure.

ThePrettyDamned

dindude;66735" said:

While we're waiting for monx, can anyone explain how Visual Sound managed to design a bespoke enclosure that looks so dreadful?

Looks are deceiving. It's a great case. Even down to the battery compartment, iirc.

The older ones have a less good battery compartment that's tighter than a gnats fanny. And the bypass switch is quite simply the best. I want all of the visual sound.

Gimme a h2o.

monquixote

More playtime today. 

I gave the Jackhammer dist side some love today. Turns out there are some big chunky metal sounds in there, but it doesn't seem raw enough in the high end to touch Randy Rhodes type stuff which is what I'm more likely to play if I'm having a silly rock moment. 

i ended up with the treble on full and the bass on pretty much nothing which highlights the slightly questionable EQ. 

Ultimately it's a very good pedal for the money, but probably not something I'll keep. 

Having back to backed the Hyde and the Shredmaster a bit more it's definitely "Inspired by" rather than a direct clone. There is more gain and more treble to be had and it's quieter. 

I really want to replace the shredmaster, but somehow it's just gutsier and more convincing even though the Hyde is smaller, quieter, better made and more versatile. 

I might try it on my board and see how I get on.

Grumpyrocker

I love the Jackhammer. The Dist side is hard to dial in if you're not used to the pedal. The easiest way is to turn both contour controls all the way to the left which takes them out of the system - that way you can get a feel;for that channel on its own.