By: William Clark
The Rocktron Reaction Distortion I offers a flexible cast of opinions towards establishing your own wall of sound. The pedal includes an assortment of knobs which provide the musician with more freedom while setting up their own sound, without becoming too overwhelming.
Tone is a quality which dedicated guitar players do not willingly compromise; quite in contrast, it serves as a passionate necessity for professional musicians who never seem to stop advancing towards achieving the ultimate sound out of their rigs.
Distortion plays a signficant role in the modernized hard rock approach; while the majority of a rock guitar player’s sound was initally delivered through pickups, a unique fingering style and the quality of amplifier during the original birth of the musical genre, it has since evolved into a stylistic frontier bracketed by eccentric tricks and a monumental, punishing tone.
As is the case with virtually any market in today’s society, once a particular item becomes popular, the volume of both producers and products increases dramatically. It’s somewhat unfair to categorize guitar equipment underneath such a description, however, it’s because of this same moniker that the catalog for distortion pedals have expanded to literally hundreds of different models, styles, and companies, leaving an more than a few musicians a little lost when it comes to deciding which one to spend some coin on.
Standing out towards the top of the most recently released distortion guitar pedals, Rocktron has outfitted a notable product with a guitar tone which has the ability to tackle nearly any rock subgenre with apparent ease, while retaining a fluent cohesiveness throughout each different frontier.
In addition to the familiar dials for Gain and Level, we also find two knobs which adjust the EQ of the distortion. While it did admittingly take a handful of nights out on the town for us to get aquainted, soon I was able to put together my own tone which boasted enough crunch to appropriately handle the music of such artists as Ratt and Van Halen.
As opposed to other guitar pedals on the market which only require a slip of a switch or the pressing of a button to switch between tones, in order to channel a more relaxed, blues rock sound requires additional guess-and-check work via the turning of the various knobs, yet all-the-while achievable.
This quality also attributes a relatable nostalgic effect to earlier models that required a notepad in order to keep up with a a broad brush diversity of tones.
What it may compromise with readability, the Rocktron Reaction Distortion I makes up for it by producing an impressive range of tones for any guitarist, at-home or professional, to conjure up their own variety of sound.
