Oh yeah, pedal talk! I'm admittedly a bit of a cork sniffer, but I'm very curious about those pedals Lugia mentioned. Quality for cheap is excellent! Chase Bliss is awesome, no doubt, though I've sold every CB pedal I've owned. Haven't tried the Mood, though.
I'm a huge Fairfield Circuitry fan. Speaking of fuzz/distortion on beats, I have a used Zvex Box of Metal inbound that I'm dying to run one of my Double Knots through. Could be cool on the Plumbutter too.
As an aside, Lugia, I picked up a Moffenzeef Kricket. Thanks for the recommendation, it's fitting in nicely!
-- baltergeist
Good call on the Moffenzeef...their stuff all seems to be designed using ultra-wacky EE methods designed to get everything BUT a "proper" electronic percussion sound...which is GOOD!
OK, Chinese pedals...aside of the GLORIOUS Cuvave rip-yer-face-off Fuzz (PUT IT IN A EURORACK MODULE, CUVAVE!!!), there's a lot of not-so-expensive goodness out there. F'rinstance, the Joyo Classic Flanger...sonically, there's a lot there that I remember from the old MXR plug-it-in-the-wall Flanger, but there's settings that the Joyo can get at that the MXR couldn't...it's especially good at long, rubbery sweeps with a lot of really extreme resonances. Or the really weird Aural Dream pedals which all seem to have settings that start where the source for that "clone" end.
Others...Daphon comes to mind, although their boxes are getting harder to find. Daphon was the OEM for Ibanez's 1980s-vintage bulbous-looking plastic-coated pedals...and they continued the production on these under their own label for a while. But the Daphons I dig are all housed in this unsmashable hammertone steel housing that resembles an industrial machine control pedal; the phaser is SO nice...not very extreme, but more in that "just right" pocket. And then, there's "it does something else"-types...like the Mosky Spring Reverb, which supposedly reworks the Malekko Spring Reverb...but DOESN'T, because when you turn the "dwell" up too high, the box will start to self-resonate and create some rather controllable feedback. On a synth.
Sure, some of these are, at worst, really mediocre. I don't have anything here (I don't THINK) by Kmise, for example. But even those you'd dismiss on appearance alone can still whip out surprises, such as some of the ugly, tiny Azor "tombstones" (their Delay in this line is just as solid as any other basic delay...but costs about $20-ish). The nice thing is that they're cheap enough that if you DO get something you just can't get happy about, it's not like you're out $200-400 (or worse!) for some boutique stomper. Or if you feel creative with something that turned out to be "meh.", you don't risk a lot of expense if you pop it open and start having at it with a soldering iron (provided you're used to SMDs...a lot of these use those).