Aguilar Agro

I actually bought this pedal for the second time. The first time around was more than a decade ago and Back then, I was not the pedal aficionado that I am today. I wanted a pedal that made my bass roar, a friend of mine worked for/with Aguilar and hooked me up with the only drive pedal in their portfolio (aside from the Tone Hammer). I put it on my board, it made my bass roar.
I can’t even remember why I sold it, so when I found one for a good price on the second hand market, I pulled the trigger.

This is the old version, and I think it’s a shame that Aguilar changed their housings from these to the newer ones, but I guess that now that Korg runs Aguilar, the production needs to be streamlined and going from the unique look to something more uniform comes also at a lower production cost.
Those old boxes really worked for me and I liked their slightly unusual form factor.

The Aguilar Agro has a four knob layout.
Volume is Volume,
Saturation is Gain.
The remaining two knobs are for shaping the sound:
Contour is a mid scoop. The manual states that it’s centered at 900Hz and has a broad Q, fully clockwise is flat, fully CCW is maximum scoop – this is applied before the sound hits the clipping stage, so it also shapes the way the Agro distorts.
Presence controls the extreme high end, from 4kHz upwards and is capable of a -20dB cut, but only a +6dB boost. This comes after the clipping stage, so you can use it to tame the sizzle, especially when running direct without a cab sim.

The knobs have that typical Aguilar feeling to them. They run smoothly, but you need to apply a healthy amount of force to turn them. These pedals can go in a gig bag, travel a bit and come out with the exact same settings.

When I connected the Agro, I tried to find a tonal setting that resembles as flat of a tone as I could get, and I was surprised that I had to turn the presence knob down a fair bit. Around 9 o’clock it felt like there’s no treble suck and no treble boost happening. Presence was easier – turn it up all the way and the effect is gone.
The way the presence knob works is interesting, I am under the impression that the Agro wants to add a lot of its grit in the frequency range that is affected by that knob. When you turn it up all the way and set a gritty tone, dialing it back will not only scoop the midrange, but also clear up considerably.
Also my ears tell me that this is not your standard mid scoop. At the first auditory glance, I could have sworn the low end gets bigger when you turn it down (towards the more pronounced scoop). Closer inspection reveals that it’s not – it just gets more room to breathe because the overshadowing mid range gets trimmed down. I also learned that there is a lot of compression going on in the Agro. Even at milder settings, where the pedal is nicely reacting to touch, the amount of saturation increases the harder you hit, but your output does not send signal spikes down the line. When you cross a certain threshold on the Saturation knob, the pedal very much feels like a distortion. You can get fairly high gain sounds out of it – certainly past what a low to mid gain Overdrive is capable of. While at lower settings it sounds nice and gritty and certainly qualifies as a low gain drive pedal, it already feels like a high gain distortion. Not only because of the amount of compression applied, but also because of that thing I can’t put my finger on, that thing that makes a distortion a distortion and not a high gain overdrive. That thing is, in this case inaudible, happening within the innards of the Agro, no matter what setting you choose. This can be great or it can be the opposite, depending on what you require of your signal chain. Purely for science, I tried to put an envelope filter after the Agro. The compression yielded a very even response from the filter, allowing it to be set precisely, but it also killed the dynamics of the filter because the trigger was hit so evenly. This can allow a player to set the Agro in its proper place in the mix and then add grit by hitting harder, but without pushing forward against the other instruments.

The sound of the pedal is something that I have no immediate comparison except maybe the Free The Tone Bass Blaster. With the Aguilar’s midscoop dialed out, they both are able to hit your ears with that clank, that is not entirely unlike the Darkglass trademark clank, but sits about one register lower. This can push a mix with high gain guitars and blends in well, and gives you a ringing slap around the ears, but while I personally dislike the piercing quality of all the Darkglass products I ever tried, the Agro’s clank is not only bearable, but indeed somewhat pleasant. It lends a certain aggressiveness to the tone, but more of a bruising kind instead of a cutting one.
I am reminded of shoveling gravel. When the truck has just dumped a pile of the stuff on your driveway and you’re busy shoveling that into a wheelbarrow. The gravel is nice and loose, so the blade of your shovel bites deep when you push, and you can extract your shovel’s worth of the stuff from the pile, now you turn around and let it slide off the blade into the metal wheelbarrow that’s already half full. That’s the feel of the grit you get. It’s a throaty shout, but with a fresh throat that’s healthy and properly maintained.
In the higher gain settings, the Presence knob mainly controls the sizzle on top and is pretty easy to set, I quickly found my sweet spot. The Contour knob will, as I said, suck out some grit when turned down. When you compensate by turning the Saturation knob higher, the nature of the drive feels very different. There is less of that cymbal-right-beside-your-ears ring to it and it gets more raspy – but also takes a step back in the mix. I think that with the knob low, you can produce some awesome bedroom tones, but when you try to use that sound with others, it sounds like the bass on “And Justice For All”. You can dial back some of it, though. The sound gets a bit more refined while the step back in the mix is not that big.

In my opinion, the Agro is a sort of hybrid between an overdrive and a distortion pedal. It can do big parts of both, yet refuses to comfortably fit into either category. Which makes it somewhat unique.
I personally have two sweet spots. The first is with the Contour nearly maxed and the Saturation rather low, so it’s just on the brink of breakup. With the Presence around noon, I get an audible boost around the top end and it makes the bass sound a bit strained, but excited as well. This would totally work as an always on tone for most styles.
The second sweet spot is where it does just cross over from sounding like an overdrive to sounding like a distortion. I dial back on the Contour until that metallic clank is audible, but not full-on in your face. This works for a roaring sound in a crowded mix, especially well when playing fast and hard.