Aguilar Storm King
The Storm King, named after Storm King Mountain on the Hudson River, is the AGS circuit from the Tone Hammer preamp pedal, housed in a tiny box and provisioned with a new set of controls. Those include a tone knob, named “Shape” and a push button named “Kick”. Apart from that, the pedal comes with gain and master controls. The housing is bent sheet metal and feels extremely sturdy, giving the pedal a reassuring weight.
The controls are simple and straightforward. Master controls the level, while gain works like it does on the Tonehammer – it passes signal at zero and adds grit as soon as you turn it up.
The Kick knob could also have been named “Bite”, because it adds a little in what my ears tell me is the 2kHz range. The shape knob controls treble. Fully turned up, I am fairly sure it boosts treble content. I don’t think that noon is flat, though. The knob is mainly geared towards controlling the amount of sizzle that passes through, so it’s located after the clipping stage.
In all the reviews I’ve seen online, the reviewers played this pedal at high gain settings most of the time, then offhandedly mention that it’s great at low gain, too – then pluck a few notes with the gain low, and instantly go back to high gain settings. I always felt curious about those low gain settings and wanted to hear more of that, so I bought my own Storm King to thoroughly test it myself.
A journey through the gain knob’s travel starts, as I mentioned already, at zero – because the pedal will still work at that setting. With a normal output bass, you will already find your low gain drive settings at 8 o’clock – when you continue upwards you cross into high gain sounds before you hit noon. Everything that comes past noon is, in terms of feel and sound, a mix of distortion and fuzz. You get a load of compression and a raw and chunky distortion sound that takes a while until it leaves the realm of brutal distortion and enters the area of smoother synth sounding fuzz. Use it right, and you can drive it into an envelope filter to get a very usable synth voice in those settings.
What is a bit weird is how my deranged brain and the pedal interact. When I found some sweet spot setting that does work well in my setup and play it, my ears tell me that the sound I’m getting is very organic. There’s not much metallic clanking, and I want to say that there are tube driven pedals out there that sound less tubey than the Storm King does. Usually, the pictures that flood my imagination when playing a pedal like that have an organic content and I write about wrestling great beasts in some fashion, but playing this, I’m thinking more of using an excavator in a gravel pit.
This might be boring if your actual job is to drive excavators in gravel pits, but it sure does sound like a lot of fun if your day job is more excel driven and less hydraulic. I think there’s a gravel pit in Germany where you can rent heavy machinery and operate it for fun – and if a place like that can hold itself in business, my argument is valid. Talking of gravel pits, we’re in the right place to describe the Storm King’s texture. The grit it offers up is chunky and thicc. There’s no creamy sound in the low and mid gain settings, this is a bass drive and since basses are bigger than guitars, their drives must have chunkier sound pixels. This certainly helps to locate the bass drive in a mix, plus it sounds like you mean business.
When the pedal begins to saturate and compress the sound, there’s a ball of frequencies in the mids and upper mids that get more pronounced, and when you ride the gain past 9 o’clock, there will be added harmonics from the drive. If you’re listening carefully, but not carefully enough, you get the impression that the low end drops a bit. Listening carefully enough, you realize that the low end remains completely unchanged. The scale tips a bit because there’s more weight added at the treble end, though.
Playing in a rough rock mix, most bassists set the output level of their drive pedals a little above unity because once overdriven, the bass takes a step back in the mix and the bump from the master volume offsets that. With the Storm King that is not strictly necessary, some settings offer up so much treble that the whole signal feels bumped up – and that’s where the illusion of a lowered bass comes from.
Regarding the reviews on the video platforms, I feel like what I’m doing in my lab is the opposite. I do acknowledge that the pedal is capable of a series of high gain sounds, but conduct the major part of my testing with the gain knob on the left hand side of noon, more or less ignoring the ripping distortion sounds. Let me say as much about them: The Storm King manages a credible version of ” I am playing a large tube amp with an 8×10 cab. The amp is dimed and I’m hitting hard. Two of the 8 speakers are blown; One has had a mechanical failure and is only capable of producing screeching sounds, the other is torn to shreds. The remaining six are clinging on for dear life. It is absolutely possible that the amp catches fire before the set is over”.
When you set it very low, you get a dynamic response, with the amount of added dirt controlled trough your finger tips. When set to “barely there” there is that raspy gravel once your plucking intensity crosses the threshold. Turn it just a touch higher and you will get double stops to sound like the middle between a burp and a belch, which can be quite satisfying to use.
All in all, this gets my sign of approval. It’s a pedal I can comfortably gig with. It sits well in the mix, takes up very little space on the board, is built extremely well, and not only does it sound good, it also feels great when playing it. The interaction between ear and fingertip are just right.
If you liked the AGS circuit on your Tonehammer, but gritted your teeth at the level jumping, get one of these. If you like a chunky overdrive, the Storm King has got your back. If you want a raw and raspy distortion, well look no further. It’s really a versatile beast, capable of low gain, high gain and even fuzz sounds. The last pedal where I enjoyed the entire range of the gain knob this much was the SS/BS Mini.
Here’s the Storm King with Gain at just before 9 o’clock and Shape at 2 o’clock. Just on the edge of breakup.
Here’s the gain a little higher. Towards the end, I increase the plucking strength to get more dirt.
Another one with the gain well before noon.
And one with the gain at noon, I dialed back on the shape knob (around 10 o’clock) to compensate the high end fizzle.