Demo: DOD Gonkulator Reissue
/Greetings pedal heads! Nick Reinhart checking in with ya and I’m super excited to show you the DOD Gonkulator reissue! A while back a little bird had told me that Digitech/DOD mastermind, Tom Cram, was working on this, and I was pretty excited about it.
Photo credit: Digitech
Long story short- in the mid-late 90’s DOD released a handful of bizarre pedals that were discontinued shortly thereafter. The Gonkulator was one of them. It’s a wild ring mod combined with a distortion. The distortion is something similar to the DOD “Grunge” circuit (Whoopsy! in the video i say it’s a RAT circuit. The DOD “Buzz Box” is supposed to be a RAT driving an MXR Blue Box, my bad).
As I mention in the video, I’ve had a couple Gonkulator-related options for my pedal board in the past- the Digitech iStomp, loaded with a DOD Gonkulator modeler and the Mantic effects “Gonker” clone, both of which are discontinued. I think the Mantic guys made between 10-20 Gonkers in total, and the iStomp is very un-user friendly, being that you need to link it with a shitty iPhone 4, which luckily I still happen to have.
The Gonkulator tributes are great and totally capture that ring mod weirdness that no one seemed to want in the 90’s, but it’s really cool to have an official reissue. Also worth noting, if the video was TL;DW (too long didn’t watch)- the ring mod tone can be tuned in this new version, so that also opens a lot of cool options. plus all these new DOD pedals that have been coming out are so damn solid, construction-wise, you really can’t beat em. At some point I’d still like to own an original, because why not
If you’re interested in learning about more DOD stuff from the past, check out http://www.americaspedal.net. Lots of great in-depth info over there, and if you want learn about the DOD of the present and future plus get the tech specs for this new guy, head over to Digitechs site here. Until next time!
-Nick
