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Holy Grit - OKKO FX

Jun 1, 2022

The Holy Grit by OKKO FX is a very versatile dirt box that has great sounds and textures for everything between boost, light breakup and cranked amp fuzzy goodness.

The basis of the circuit design is the fuzz face/tonebender topology, but heavily tweaked.

When playing around with the Holy Grit to explore its sounds, I found it to be more of an overdrive that can also do fuzz. It feels a lot like an amp-in-a-box pedal (which I like a lot).

The bias toggle in the middle kinda sets the limit of how much gain/texture you can get out of the pedal. Up is high headroom, down is medium gain and the middle position is slightly underbiased, which makes for a more hairy, thicker texture.

With the bias toggle in the middle and the fuzz knob set to maximum, it feels like a cranked tweed amp for those Neil Young tones.

The bass knob controls the amount of bass that goes into the gain section, i.e. bass control is pre-gain. That means more bass equals more gain. With higher settings for the fuzz and bass knob, we get into fuzz territory.

Treble is post-gain, so you can tame the brightness a bit.

I found that unity gain for the level control is about 10 o’clock, so there is a lot of volume on tap to use the Holy Grit as a boost. In the demo, you can here it smashing the front-end of my Iridium with the chime amp sim (Vox®-like sound). Level and Treble dimed gives you that top-boost sound.

Bass and Treble both don’t offer huge ranges. I think these were designed to only give you useful settings. No matter how you set the pedal, there is no bad sound in it.

A nice feature is the buffer toggle on the topside of the pedal. In my demo, all sounds where recorded in buffered mode. That means you can place the pedal anywhere in your signal chain and it just works as expected.

With my reamping recording setup, it wasn’t possible to showcase the unbuffered mode. I have a proper reamp device, but the unbuffered fuzz circuit needs to see real pickups at the input to get that guitar/fuzz interaction. Just know that you have the option to set it up like an old school fuzz, at the front of your signal chain, without buffers.

Bottom line: The Holy Grit is right up my alley. Transparent, amp-like overdrive with pleasing textures that can go into fuzz. The design is old-school utilitarian. Also, it works great on bass.

Recording Notes

Main Guitar

  • K’mo Memphis Std., classic T-style pickups (both pickups)
  • Holy Grit in buffered mode
  • Strymon Iridium (Chime)
  • Focusrite Scarlett 2i2
  • GarageBand

Bass

  • JMJ Mustang* with Fender flatwounds (tone 100% open, played with pick)
  • Holy Grit with a medium gain setting
  • Strymon Iridium with my usual bass setup
  • Just a little EQing to bring out ~3kHz and low mids around 200Hz

Intro Overdubs

  • K’mo Memphis with Tele neck pickup
  • Holy Grit on a light to medium gain setting
  • Boss DM-2w Delay
  • Two takes, panned left and right 30%

Ambient Swells

  • K’mo Memphis with Tele bridge pickup
  • Walrus Audio Slö on the “rise” setting with mix 100% so I get an auto-swell effect
  • Holy Grit with a medium gain setting for texture and sustain
  • Walrus Audio Polychrome for some movement and more texture
  • Boss DM-2w Delay for even more ambience
  • Two takes, hard panned left and right

Drums

  • GarageBand drummer Max (punk rock) on the Eastbay kit
  • Stock GarageBand Rat-style distortion on snare and kick drum, mixed in to taste for a bit more punch
  • Plenty of compression

The whole mix has some compression, limiter and exciter applied to it to glue it all together.

Links

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