Devi Ever Stone

There’s not too much info on the first page of google results when you enter “Devi Ever Stone” into the search box. But it’s obviously an effect pedal, it’s named Stone and it was made by Devi Ever.
I only heard news about her in passing, never paying too much attention, but I think she started making effects, then sold her business to Dwarfcraft and then got it back a while later, going in and out of business for a bit. Right now, the website advertised on the pedal, Deviever dot com, points to a search engine optimization thing.
But one does not need to find the full story of a pedal if one has the pedal itself as proof of existence.
The manual is quite generic, just a single sheet of paper that describes all Devi Ever pedals in rough terms. Does one need a manual for this pedal? It has two 1/4″ jacks, a barrel jack, a foot switch, a LED and two knobs, labeled Volume and Pregain. I will simply assume that the right jack is the input and the left jack is the output. Furthermore I’ll feed it 9V center negative. The red light indicates on/off status, triggered by the foot switch and the two knobs shall be explored. It’s an effect pedal, how hard can it be?

With both knobs at noon, I’m not exactly sure if all my assumptions were correct. Have you ever plugged a 110V hair dryer in a 230V socket? First contact felt a bit like that, only the lights in the entire house did not dim when flicking the switch. It is a fuzz, and it is a gnarly one. The volume knob controls the output volume and this pedal has a lot of output. Really. Let me write that again, using capital letters and a bold font: This pedal has a LOT of output. As usual, I have a Cali76 Compact Bass compressor down the line for peak limiting. That comp has a jewel bezel over the LED. It lights up red when the unit is on but not engaged and goes orange when it is – the manual told me the intensity of the glow and the amount of yellow tells how much it compresses. I’ve only ever seen the orange hue get a little lighter at times in the years that I had it. With the Stone’s volume three quarters up, it was bright, pure yellow, a color I’ve never seen on that indicator.

The Pregain knob feels a bit like … well..
You’re walking along a building site, then you hear someone scream, so you rush over. You see that one of the guys has fallen from the scaffolding and did not crash directly on the dirt floor, but managed to impale himself on some unknown tool. You really can’t tell what tool that is because all you can see is the handle sticking out of the poor person’s midsection. You mainly wonder about two things. What internal organs would be in the place that is now occupied by the handle – I mean it cannot be the lungs or diaphragm, because the screams would not be that loud if they were. But more importantly, you wonder what tool it is that the unlucky dude has himself impaled on. So you walk over, take the handle, and examine it, turning it a bit, and moving it, to see more details. The fallen builder is not really interested in your curiosity, that selfish prick is completely encased in his own bubble of searing pain. He won’t answer your questions, but every time you touch that handle, his screaming goes up, both in pitch and intensity. That pregain knob feels a bit like the handle of that unknown tool.
Your signal gets mangled, maimed and fed to the wolves clipping diodes.
I really assumed that I did something wrong at first, because it sounded so broken. Then I toyed around a bit and not too long later, I was trying to play the title melodies of 8 bit video games from memory.

The Stone certainly is on the “creative” side of fuzz pedals. There are no real low gain settings to speak of. You often have a certain range on dirt pedals. With the gain all the way down, they start clean or mostly clean and then you increase and reach some sort of sweet spot, where the pedal does what it is advertised to do. When you increase further, on some pedals the sound slowly leaves the credible territory and becomes something synthetic, which can be useful or terrible. Where the throw on a normal overdrive pedal’s gain knob ends, it’s just a stone throw’s distance to the point where the Stone’s gain starts. If you enjoy a drive pedal on the gentle settings, where it’s hovering on the brink of breakup to add just a tiny dab of special sauce to your sound, please go away. There’s nothing here for you. Mark your map with the words “Here be Dragons” and hurry off into calmer waters. This is for those who will twist all the knobs until the end, find the most unusual and harshest settings possible, hit a note, listen, and then try and make something musical off the result. If you’re into music genres that have the word “noise” in them, you should feel right at home. You want to play lead voice in an 8 bit orchestra but don’t have the faintest idea on how to start? This. Get a Devi Ever Stone and you’re halfway there. All you need to figure out is how to tame that thing enough it won’t go for your throat at the first chance that presents itself.
I don’t think a noisegate will help, there is not much distinction between unwanted and wanted noise, and maybe one becomes the other at certain points.

It is a rough fuzz that produces a wall of sound. In my mind, there are basically three fuzz sounds. One is the Muff style sound. Like when you take the raw bits of overdrive and escalate them way too much. It’s not overdrive any more. It’s rabid, crack smoking, mange eaten overdrive now. The other is the Wooly Mammoth kind of tone, that warm fuzzy feeling for your ears, that’s not threatening at all. And then there’s the keyboarder running off with the guitar pedals again. Turning them up way too high and feeding them too much signal while starving the voltage. Those glitchy, spluttery, weird sounds that don’t really sound like anything organic any more, tones that sound like electronics being sick. The synthy kind of fuzz. The Devi Ever Stone feels like it does the synthy kind well, but it somehow has one eye towards the Muff. It’s a bit like a rabid laptop that tries to run off and bite other computers.