XT-2 Xtortion

Idiosyncratic, unconventional, temperamental, versatile.  It's like this pedal and I are soulmates.  I first picked it up in the mid-90s after my old DOD Classic Fuzz broke.  It was a drastic change in sound, but it was just right change for the direction the noise-rock/artpunk band I was in at the time was taking: as our songs were becoming tighter, faster, and more technical, the nervy industrial sound of this pedal seemed to just fit right in.  Later we added another guitarist who played a Laney half-stack with more of a traditional Marshall-stack-like rhythm sound, and I was able to get a great Boston-eque tone out of my pawn-shop-special Westone Spectrum using this pedal and a Carvin head with a graphic EQ set to pull some mids out.  When I'd go for lead lines, it would cut through loud and clear, and when I went for purposely dissonant chords, this pedal would actually play up the dissonance beautifully. I used it for a couple more years after that but then lost it, and seemed to recall that it was broken.  After something like 10 years without it, the other day I went to visit a friend, and he had found it in his house and gave it back to me.  I took it home and was pleasantly surprised to find that it still works, with one minor glitch (see below).  These days I play one of those Les-Paul-ish DeArmonds through a Music Man combo with a single 15", so having a pretty bass-heavy tone to begin with, I wasn't missing any with this pedal active.  At first I tried for the kind of metallic tones I used to use this pedal for, but then after tinkering a little more I was able to dial in something very reminiscent of the fuzz that Jack White uses a lot for leads these days (see "Ball and Biscuit"), something which I hadn't expected at all to stumble into.  This box is full of surprises.

I'm having one problem that I suspect may be a short in the input jack, and when it shorts out, a piercing microphonic-feedback-like sound comes out.  This happens occasionally when I step to turn it on, or when the cable wiggles just the wrong way.  I suspect this was what caused me to conclude it was broken all those years ago.  In several years of playing interspersed with several years of kicking around neglected in someone's basement however, that's the only trouble I've had with it.  Hopefully it will be easy for someone with a soldering iron to find and fix.

You have to be willing to spend a little time tinkering to get a sound that works for you.  This thing makes a million different distortions, and a lot of them are only usable if you're purposely being obnoxious, and a lot of others have a boxy fixed-wah narrow-band-mids effect that is only cool if it happens to be what you're going for.  It's not intuitively obvious what the "countour" and "punch" knobs actually do, and what's worse is that their effects don't seem totally independent, but they actually effect each other in weird ways, like helicopter controls.  The trick is to just adjust a little at a time, play a riff or two, and adjust a little more to taste.

I've dealt with Boss with respect to other pedals besides this one, needing a repair or two, and they've been the kid of solid and efficient outfit that is notable for how little you notice it.  Very good.

I'm glad to have this back again.  In the meantime I obtained a Rat that I also dearly love, but sometimes you just wish for something different, and I've often reminisced about this pedal and seriously considered picking one up on eBay, where they appear to be going for more than I paid for this thing new -- I guess they're seeing a revival, and being out of production for some years now they're considered "rare."