To celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Mr. Hendrix landing on our shores, Roger Mayer has released the Visage. This fuzz pedal lets you reconfigure between 45 different tone choices, allowing the user to replicate the tones Jimi and Roger achieved all those years ago.
Read the latest article in Ultimate Guitar about Roger Mayer here.
Here's what Roger has to say on the Visage:
It's hard to imagine it's been 50 years ago since Jimi landed in London and his arrival historically changed the goal posts for the standard of tone, guitar playing and performance. I am constantly asked about our tone secrets and of course there was not one but many with a F1 approach to obtaining the ultimate solution for performance and tone for whatever the situation might be.
So I decided to manufacture a new cutting edge design with heritage roots and configuration to bring to today's modern players a solution that will offer them many of the same parameter changes and electronic techniques that Jimi and I shared and developed. A standard fixed solution was rejected as access to these famous tones requires flexibility with multiple internal circuit manipulations as we always were experimenting and using all sorts of modifications and changes to give a particular track special and magical properties.
I am proud to introduce the VISAGE which has 45 parameter combinations that give players access to the internal stages of the basic configuration that we used back then with the performance benefit gained from using today's low noise high quality components. Modern design techniques with triple shielding using a 6 layer PC Card gives added stability and freedom from oscillation and other nasty artefacts that other simple layout configurations might introduce.
80dB of onboard power supply filtering is provided for both Battery and External Power Supply operation. The result is a remarkably quiet and fast reacting device that responds very well to the players touch and retains the character of the original guitar even with lots of distortion going on. The harmonics generated are very musical and due to the lack of artefacts sound better today than 50 years ago. The guitar volume can be used very effectively to clean up the sound even when the Drive control is maxed out. The amount of Output Level is huge and can drive the 1st Stage of an amp very hard and make it fold up easily.
So you can rest and relax easy now as there is a real alternative to buying up some brightly coloured pedal that has dubious claims to originality using NOS parts etc. I have never really subscribed or endorsed this trend and always believed in offering products utilising today's best quality parts and techniques. After all we never used old gear then nor would we have used anything that did not move the State of the Art forwards. There is no magical answer by fixating on one component change or type as you will find out and prove to yourself when you start to experiment with the VISAGE.
Playing with the VISAGE and changing the parameters will give you and your ears a valuable lesson in understanding the correlation between what you actually hear and what you see from a graph. You can't obtain this information except by experiencing it.
Specifications:
- Brand: Roger Mayer
- Model: Visage
- Colour: Grey
- Inputs: Single 1/4"
- Output: Single 1/4"
- Power Supply: Not Included - External Power Supply friendly with virtual battery powering
- Controls : Volume and Drive
- Condition: New
