Effectrode SR-71 Blackbird
Apologies for the state of the pedal in the photo. It is dirty. This is how I received it when buying it second hand from Italy. I ran it through the dishwasher twice before I attempted any audio experiments with it, so imagine all the testing being done with a shiny unit and not a grimy one as pictured.
My first contact with Effectrode was the LA-1A compressor. One thing stuck out to me immediately: The audio quality. I did not really like the way the compression worked, but the balanced out was professional, studio grade stuff, and the tubes ran absolutely silent, giving the sound the audiophile kind of tube warmth and magic. In that regard, it easily competed with devices that cost more than double of what Effectrode charges for the LA-1A. That made me curious about their drive pedals. There is the Tube Drive and the Blackbird. I ordered both.
When I hear the name Blackbird, I involuntarily imagine that weird looking US Military plane that went incredibly fast. Googling that plane, I learn that it’s named the Lockheed SR-71 – so the pedal is indeed named after that. I would have guessed that with Effectrode being a UK based brand, it was named after the Beatles song from the White Album. Effectrode resides in a small town just south of Stoke-on-Trent, where Ian Fraser “Lemmy” Kilmister was born.
But that plane is cool, too.
The Blackbird runs three 12AX7 tubes. Two are for the gain, while the third one acts as input and output buffer.
There are two rows of knobs, with gain, master and three band EQ. That EQ is the classic Fender tone stack, taken straight from the Blackface amp – another reason to pick a name with ‘Black’ in it.
The two foot switches are for activation/bypass of the pedal and the channel selection.
The top of the unit features two switches, one is named Classic/Creamy and the other is named Pre-emphasis. The former will switch between symmetrical and asymmetrical clipping, while the latter is, very simply put, a pre-drive treble boost.
As both the looks and the price suggest, the Effectrode Blackbird does not only boast a high quality audio output, but also very high quality workmanship and parts selection. The knobs feel just right, with smooth but not too smooth travel and the input/output jacks plug and unplug with a reassuring feeling.
Apart from the usual, tube buffered output, there’s also a balanced output that is transformer coupled. As the sticker on the unit boasts, the Transformer in question is made by Triad. I must admit that I have no clue whether or not that is a good brand for audio transformers, but I guess when Effectrode decide to put a sticker on their pedal mentioning the name, it’s top notch.
It’s also possible to run the balanced output with a regular TS cable – to your amp or other pedals instead of a mixing desk. All you have to take into account that you’ll receive a boost.
The very first thing I noticed was that the clean channel does not have a gain knob.
I’ve read the manual multiple times in the past. I’ve looked at pictures of the thing. I’ve hunted for one for weeks. Yet, I never noticed that the clean channel has no gain knob. I would have sworn it has two identical rows of knobs this morning. Now that I unpacked it, I know better.
Well, that is unfortunate for me, because I thought I’d try it in the place of the Meatsmoke, with one channel slightly dirty and the other melting your face off – but the only person to blame for this disappointment is me, for being stupid. I double checked the pics and the manual, and it’s all there – hidden in a blind spot my eye placed over the missing gain knob.
So, after calming down from that, I gave it a twirl then, to see what it can do.
Here’s my first thought on it: This is what the Origin Bassrig ’64 should have been, or wanted to be. You get one channel, tube driven, with a Fender Blackface EQ and it runs clear as crystal, then you get a slightly different version of that channel, with gain.
I said the Bassrig ’64 does white collar dirt, and I think the Blackbird does the same.
This is not Lemmy Kilmister drunk and in a mood, but much rather James Jamerson going for it.
I did try to find the differences that make the Verellen Measmoke, which is essentially a similar thing, sound like Harley exhaust fumes and leather pants while the Blackbird sounds like a pristine white shirt with the tie loosened and the top button undone, but I can’t really put my finger on them.
Both units use very similar means of getting their sounds. More or less the same simple tone stack, two tubes to get the drive done – but the texture of the Blackbird stays sorta coherent while the Meatsmoke tears it up in a more chaotic manner.
But let’s not talk about the Meatsmoke.
The clean channel is a tube driven Fender tone stack. I’ve had the blue AMT pedal, several Sushi Box Particle Accelerators and Underground Accelerators, the EBS Valve Drive, the non-tube Spaceman Redstone, the Broughton Scorpion and other pedals that do the same thing.
However, the Blackbird does its thing Effectrode style. It’s virtually noiseless. Really. Dead quiet. The audio quality really is a solid notch above the rest.
The sound is richly saturated with all the right things and lacks the wrong stuff – this is tubes done right, no corners cut. In my humble opinion, the hardest thing to do is a good clean sound with tubes, because that requires a solid quality. Tube drive circuits can be a little noisy and a little dirty, some of that comes with the gain anyways.
Tube magic, the third dimension, that airy sparkle up top that never gets shrill, the warm and round bottom that is tight and articulated even though it’s fat, too – that is what’s hard to do. You get that here. I don’t know – there is a certain something about a tube driven pedal that is done so well that it runs completely clean with no noise at all. That’s the big league. The Noble does that, and it costs twice as much and you’ll have to wait 10 months for one.
That particular tone stack comes with the absolute inability to influence the midspectrum aside from scooping out frequencies I desperately need. As with all these devices, I set the mids knob to fully CW and will never touch it again, except for checking if it’s still fully CW and did not get bumped down by accident.
The other channel, the one with the gain knob, actually has two drive engines, which you can select with the switch up top. The positions are labeled classic and creamy. One setting has less gain and feels like there are less harmonics coming from the drive. It’s amp like dirt, pushing back hard when you push it. Very dynamic, both in range and in feeling.
The other setting is much more forward. It does not really push you on, but it’s not pushing back either. Like a Tube Screamer, it hangs there, reacting to what you do without imparting a momentum in either direction. Luckily, it does not sound like a Tube Screamer. It sounds like a screaming tube. Because it is. The manual states that the less gainy setting produces asymmetrical clipping, while the gainier setting clips symmetrical.
When you go through the gain knob’s travel, you can hear how the cascading happens and one by one, the gain stages in the tubes start saturating. This all happens in a very cultivated manner, until it gets a bit chaotic towards the end – it works in both creamy and classic mode.
Right now I think that this is a fantastic pedal when you’re looking for a clean preamp that can add a little grit when you want it. This should work exceptionally well in many styles. Especially with the texture of the drive being so well mannered, you can sneak in a little grind into genres that don’t usually do bass dirt.
You can have it sitting at a mostly clean setting and then let the bass growl a little when you dig in more, but it’s not overpowering a mix when doing so. It also interacts well with other drive pedals. Feed it a slightly dirty boosted signal and the whole behavior changes, which invites experimenting. It really feels like the front end of a two channel amp in that regard.
I fail to understand why the balanced out has to be a TRS jack, since the industry standard for a balanced out is XLR, and you’ll usually find an XLR cable waiting for you when you get up on stage to perform the sound check – but I circumvented that with an adapter cable that goes from an angled TRS to XLR.
All in all, this is a great, high quality – nah, highest quality – preamp pedal. It can hold its own in a league with the Noble, the Simone and all these $1000+ pedals, at a significantly cheaper price point.
I said it already, but I’ll say it again. Running a clean signal with a circuit that uses tubes is the hardest thing to do. Do it on the cheap and your tube driven pedal will introduce tube noise into your signal chain, but hold back on the magic. That pristine, absolutely clean, audiophile high fidelity sound only works when everything is done just right. The Effectrode qualifies to play in this league.
And on top of that, you also get a drive channel.