Sushi Box FX Fluffy Kitten

This started as some kind of joke. I think that a designer friend of Nathan came up with the design and he had to follow up with a pedal for it. When the Fluffy Kitten was released by Sushi Box FX, there was a VERY limited run, I think it was either 12 or 15 pedals in total. The web server broke down and was unable to handle all the requests and people all over the globe complained about lag.
Except for me. I live in rural Germany. We’re used to lag.

[Imagine my best Bane voice impression]
Oh, you think problematic bandwidth is your ally. But you merely adopted the lag; I was born in it, moulded by it. I didn’t see a stable connection until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but BLINDING!

With the others out of their depth and me very much at home with laggy servers, I managed to get my order through before they were sold out. What did I buy? I had no idea. A colorful pedal with a cute kitten.
It is one of the very few Sushi Box FX pedals that does not rely on tube technology. The knobs have kitten noises as their description – the top row is gain, presence and level,
the lower row is bass, mids and treble.
So apart from looking cute, what can this pedal do for us bass playing folk? I’m sorry to admit it, but not much at all. The Fluffy Kitten is a distortion pedal and it’s meant for guitar, which becomes very evident when you try the bass knob. With the knob all the way CCW, there is no bass at all. With the knob fully CW, there is still a massive bass suck. This is not a pedal that can bring on the thunder for the low frequency lovers. No shaking earth at all. When you play higher up the neck, your notes get a singing character with a nice grind to it. You know those chainsaw-sculptures that have really intricate designs and an astounding amount of detail? It’s a bit like that. There certainly is some chainsaw grind going strong here, but there also is some finer detail. I think I need to bring this one to a rehearsal and let my guitarist try it for lead passages.

The bass cut, however, was too strong for me to experiment any further – I ran it with a Broughton FX Filter Loop pedal that allows a clean blend and I was able to blend the lows seamlessly, but the result was not really exciting.