Electro Harmonix - Holy stain (Pedal)

I was looking around for a multi effects pedal. I considered the Boss Me-50 amongst other things, and as much as I don't doubt it is worth what it costs, it was just too much.

Then, I stumbled upon the Holy Stain by electro harmonix. It is pretty cheap (around the £70 mark) and you can be pretty sure of the quality of electro harmonix- none of that made in Japan slightly iffy stuff you usually get. So, without further ado, the review.

Features

Being analog, the system for selecting effects is alot harder to explain than it is to use. The pedal has three gain "Dirt" settings- Clean, Fuzz and Drive. For these it has three "colour" settings- Bright, Dark and Warm.

Then, it has four effects to choose from- Hall reverb, Room reverb, Pitch shifter and Tremolo. With all of these you have a mix option between the dry signal and the effected signal. Then, you have an "Amount" knob which control the amount of reverb from the reverb signal, the rate of the tremolo and the note of the pitch shifter from a 5th down to a 4th up. In addition to this, it has the obligatory tone control which is incredibly responsive and makes more of a difference than any other tone control I've used.

My only complaint is you can only have one of the effects and one of the drive settings at any time, and when switching effects you have to re-adjust the mix/amount controls.

Sound quality

In keeping with the format of the features, I'll go through the dirt first. The fuzz and drive are both brilliant, as you would expect from Electro Harmonix. The colour settings make a great difference, and all sound wonderful.

Now on to the effects. Both reverbs are brilliant. The best I've ever heard. Not only this, but the mix control allows you to have only the reverb signal and no dry signal at all which can make for really weird noises, which I enjoyed a great deal more than I should have The pitch shifter is very good, and allows for alot of weird and wonderful tones. However, the shifted signal has a very slight delay on it. This is fine so long as the dry signal is still audible, but can fast become disorientating when the dry signal is cut out entirely. The tremolo is spectacular. A slight bit of reverb is added to this setting. The tremolo is slightly dirtier than most, and I like this. It can go from a very low to very high rate.