Customer Reviews

Digitech DDM Death Metal Analog Distortion Pedal

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Ok I have been playing guitar for about 5 years. Electric Guitar for almost 2. I kinda got bored of not having a loud heavy distortion. Using any amp you can get heavy distortion by turning up the preamp high and the postamp down, but then the sound is barely audible. So when I got this I immeadiatly fell in love with it. The sound at first gave me too much feed back. So what you have to do is you have put your amp on clean. If you want to use your amp distortion for the entire song and then this pedal for the solo then you have to be playing from the moment you turn the distortion on til the moment you turn it off or else it screechs. The sugested settings (death scoop, smooth, knifes edge, and rectified) are good for getting used to the pedal, but after awhile you need to find your own settings. I love this pedal. I compared it to such pedals as the Metal Zone and The Boss Death Metal (digitech bought out Boss so they are the same, just the digitech has more crunch) and the Digitech Grunge.

My set up is a Washburn Dime 332 with light gauge strings and the factory pick-ups. My amp is a Peavey Rage 158. It's a 10 watt, but with this pedal it sounds like a 30. It's amazing. All those reviews you read that said you can't get softer sounds are wrong. You just need to use the volume setting on your guitar. If you turn it down low, you can get a blues tone out of it.

Now this thing is built like a rock, I have a good size dent in my floor now from when I dropped it, but the thing still sings. It is a mini tank. Even though you get good battery life I would suggest you still get the AC adaptor.

This pedal is perfect for any metal head! Don't waste you time on the other pedals. This one is the best you can get, and it's cheap too!

Review:

-Makes small amps sound huge, and huge amps sound... well just sound bigger.

-Can get soft sounds out of it

-Less expensive yet still as good

-Built like a tank!

-Gives you sounds of all good Metal Bands (Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Slayer, Metallica... etc.)

-Excellent beginner/intermediate/advanced pedal.

This pedal has it's place in metal, but I wouldn't use it for death metal, the Grunge, which I own, has a much more metal character that I would push tubes with. This pedal is decent but very thrashy in sound quality, shop around before you buy. Try other pedals at a local retailer, and bring your amp in to hear what you would REALLY sound like, then, make a decision, and come back.

I got this pedal a couple of years ago for my birthday, and, for the most part, I've been happy with it when I play it with guitars.

First off, you can't really produce much of what I would consider authentic "Death Metal Distortion", the distortion is kind of heavy, but is not much heavier than some of the stuff you can get from a normal distortion pedal.

When I first got this pedal, it had an enormous amount of feedback, so much in fact that I had to turn the volume and master knobs on my amp to around 1 or 2. Thankfully, with time, the feedback was died out a bit. The sounds you can produce are decent, not great, but are good enough for $50.

I'm not much of a guitarist (even though I fool around with it), I'm a quite experienced bass player, and I must say this pedal sounds terrible with basses. When you play notes in succession, its hard to hear whether you are playing a chord or whether you are playing separate notes as they all mesh together. Most notes are too low (especially when you play 6 string like I do) to decipher and end up sounding like garbage. I do not recommend for a bass player.

Overall, its an okay pedal, kind of muddy though, good if you can't dish out for more expensive pedals, but it will do.

I've owned a Digitech Death metal pedal for about 2 years now, and I love it. It provides a great uber-distortion sound, with a fair range of tone modification. The only negative that I'd point out is that the level of distortion isn't adjustable on the pedal. I'm sure more experienced guitarists deal with this by tweaking the volume knob on the guitar. Fair enough.

As for the pedal being "muddy?" Ummm...the distortion on this thing has like 500x gain. You push a gnat fart through this, and it will sound distorted and muddy. Period. That's what happens when you jack up a signal, and clip it - adding all those harmonics and overtones muddy the sound. Try playing with the tone knobs (duh!) to clean up the sound. Or better yet, get better pickups for your guitar. This pedal won't make stock pickups sound like their active, though it'll certainally run with the ball a pretty good length in this regard. One of the guitars I have I've adjusted the stock humbuckers so that they're closer to the strings, and I get all sorts of metal nonsense from them when running through this pedal. Active pickups with this thing would sound absolutely insane.

Also, feedback? Well, again, that's what you're going to get when you jack up the signal 500x (double duh!). The solution to this? Try switching your style to something a little more accomodating to feedback-less performance like a Air Supply cover band, or a Hall and Oates tribute band. I can get feedback from a mild overdrive pedal if I have a 50w amp jacked to 10, nevermind having this thing in the chain. So yeah, you're going to get feedback. Deal with it by not standing directly in front of the amp and thrashing about playing power chords.

Finally, I have to agree that you can dial in a heavier distortion sound from a Digitech Grunge. The downside with the Grunge is that you have far less flexibility with the tone settings than with this pedal - the devil here is in the details. Inbound and outbound tone filtering on a distortion is at least 50% of your tone and sound, so having a distortion with three tone knobs, as opposed to two, provides far more flexibility to the average guitarist. The only other way you're going to get a better tone is having a full-on EQ, which I don't see many people offering these days. There are few pedals, like the Boss, that have a four-knob EQ, but frankly I think the distortion on these suck. They're not heavy enough, not sensitive enough, and just sound all-around anemic. I use the Digitech Death Metal all the time, and love it.

This pedal has way to much high end. If you like your ears bleeding and messy tone then you will like it. But I prefer chunk in my metal. I would pass this up and get the Digitech grunge pedal or even the black 13.

This pedal is definitely worth its price. I am going to keep this short... This was the first pedal i ever bought. High output so its fun to play with. You can get alot of different sounds out of it. HEAVY. Im not sure this pedal should be classified as "Death Metal" but i liked it. I'm a HARDCORE MetallicA fan, (think what you want)and i was able to get a good thrashy sound with this out of my marshall. I have a Jackson Dinky and a Dean ML. the tone with the jackson is OK but the stock pickups on the ML are very high output so i can get a good high treble tone with it. I'm getting bill lawrences and dimetimes on the ML so that should be fun.

The only downsides i can think of are it uses alot of battery so you have to replace it alot (MAKE SURE YOU UNPLUG THE CABLES AFTER USING IT) and i don't like the digitech pedal system. Its my opinion but i like the MXRs better. You can just stomp on it when your playing.

I would recomend this pickup to someone whos not extremely experienced and hasnt used alot of distortion pedals before. Also if you just dont like the distortion on your amp. They're cheap so its a great upgrade for only 50 buck. I was retarded and didnt try it out first but luckily i liked it. They're only 50 bucks and there worth it. If your more experienced i would recomend shopping around more. This isnt a "specific tone" pedal if you know what i mean. I hope I was helpful .

Pedal is at a great price for the sound it provides! I would recommend this pedal to anyone looking for more distortion and the able to change your lows/mids/highs. Really great for heavy metal and death metal of course :D

The death metal pedal works well with some amplifiers but can sound terrible with other amps. My biggest qualm with this pedal is that it does not have a gain knob to adjust the intensity of distortion. The distortion can be overbearing since it always has that death metal sound to it. I would recommend that you make sure it sounds good with your amp before purchasing.

it could be better. I had this pedal for about 2 days but I sent it back because I felt that it didn't offer enough in terms of settings (especially for a digitech pedal). Give it a try, if you like it keep it. I personally decided to go with the Digitech Metal Master because it has a lot more to offer in terms of tonal variation.

Pros:
Good construction for the price.
Pretty sweet graphics.
Good place to start a search for your tone.

Cons:
Digitech is lazy (they usually use the same hardware in every pedal with a different program running on the chip)
For a Digitech pedal the tonal selection is pretty limited.

This pedal is extremely heavy, is actually fairly versatile, and can even make a squier sound excellent and hot.

I mean if there was a pedal that was considered to be "ultimate", this would be the one.