T-Rex TwinBlaze

If you’ve always wanted an overdrive or distortion pedal featuring two fully independent channels with exactly the same facilities, here it is!

I collected quite a few T‑Rex pedals when they were first launched, as they always seemed to offer something slightly different from other brands, and have kept an original T‑Rex Replica delay on my gigging pedalboard for nearly a quarter of a century. So it’s great to see the Danish guitar‑pedal brand back in the hands of original founders Sebastian Jensen and Lars Dahl, and displaying their blend of audio quality and design innovation once again.

Their new TwinBlaze is a two‑channel distortion pedal, with a single 12AX7A tube stage. Admittedly, there are quite a lot of drive pedals that purport to be ‘two‑channel’ units, but few of them fully live up to that description. The TwinBlaze certainly does. Here, you have two identical channels, with the same control line‑up — Gain, Bass, Middle, Treble, Presence and Level — plus a Crunch/Lead mode switch. Individual footswitches are configured to select Channel A/bypass or B/bypass, and there’s a third footswitch for a post‑distortion boost of up to 20dB that you can use to lift your sound up‑front for a solo without changing the tone or drive level.

It’s not as big as it might look in pictures — it is actually the same depth as a Fulldrive, and only about 40mm wider, so it won’t eat up too much precious space if you’re a pedalboard user. Power comes from a supplied 12V DC external PSU. The current draw is a fairly hefty 500mA, so do bear that in mind if you’re using a multi‑output PSU. There are top‑mounted quarter‑inch jacks for the input and output connections, augmented by a speaker‑emulated jack for direct recording or using as a PA feed.

As well as the main quarter‑inch jack input and output, there’s an analogue filter‑based speaker‑emulated output.

Two Full‑featured...