Being a guitarist that isn’t a blues player can sometimes be tough. Majority of all demo videos on gear have some guy on a Strat playing 12 bar licks and it seems every time you ask someone working in a guitar shop about overdrive pedals you get the same answer – “All you need is a tube screamer buddy, that’s all Stevie Ray needed!”
Now don’t get me wrong, Stevie Ray Vaughan is a fantastic guitarist – one of the best. The Stratocaster’s an amazingly versatile instrument and the tube screamer one of the best stompboxes in history. But if I’m not jamming out blues scale licks for three hours a night, how’s that the right answer for me.
With the rapid rise of the boutique pedal market I suppose this mentality is beginning to become a bit of an old fashion train of thought. The tube screamer (and its many, many variations/imitations) is far from a clear sounding or transparent sounding pedal. It works amazingly in many applications but hardly retains your original guitar tone.
This is where a pedal like the Voyager from Walrus Audio comes into the picture. Unlike many overdrive pedals, the Voyager seems to retain the tone of your guitar/amp combination. This results in an incredibly clear guitar tone that gives great definition and works seamlessly with other guitar pedals in your set up.
When working in midrange frequencies and in the context of a band, clarity is something that can be quite hard to come by and that is also quite often overlooked. The beauty of this pedal is its flexibility in filling the shoes of a number of roles yet all the while keeping that clarity and presence. By running the tone at 12 o’clock and backing the gain level right back you notice no real tonal change whatsoever, enabling you to run this pedal as a clean boost. The tone knob then can add that nice clean sparkle to your tone or roll it back to darken up the picture.
By now raising the gain control we can gradually filter in the overdrive. As the signal begins to dirty, there begins to be a little bit of tonal change; the low end begins to compress and the midrange seems be brought out. However in the way that this is done, it doesn’t seem to add frequencies in or add a blanket as much as it seems to enhance or draw the overtones out that we’re already there. What this does is liven up your guitar signal and help you to be heard in a band setting. The light compression and clarity it brings to the table also seems to balance out filter type pedals that might be a bit more unpredictable. Things like a Blue Box, Whammy, POG or an Envelope Filter that may have random jumps in volume seemed to be evened out and balanced when running the Voyager after these in the chain.
The gain control is very gradual and ranges all the way from light clean boost to slight amp breakup all the way to medium gain overdrive that sits in classic rock territory. The tone control wavers from darker tones that still don’t get muddy to a sparkly presence that brings out overtones and harmonic series without getting too bright when turned all the way up.
The build quality from the folk at Walrus Audio is second to none. The casing is extremely solid, the three (volume, gain and tone) control knobs are smooth to turn and firmly attached and the 9V power socket is counter sunk at just the right level to be able to take right angle jacks. There is great attention to detail with the artwork also. It’s finished in a surf green casing (with some other of Walrus Audio’s pedals seemingly using Dakota Red and Daphne Blue too!) and has a very detailed image of the Russian Soyuz Spacecraft.
Overall this pedal is as versatile an overdrive as I’ve used. I’ve been using it with a Fender Super Reverb and the enhanced mids and overtones allows my guitar to be heard in the mix and helps bring out the best tonal characteristics of my guitar, amp and other effects. The closest thing I could liken it to is the now infamous Klon Centaur pedal, and with these now going for about $1500 on Ebay, about an eighth of this price seems like a pretty fair deal to me.
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