Black Arts Toneworks Coven Dual Overdrive & Fuzz

Black Arts Toneworks Coven Dual Overdrive and Fuzz

The Black Arts Toneworks Coven is the latest dual-pedal design.

Features the popular Pharaoh Fuzz and Black Forest Overdrive in one pedal board-friendly size.

Controlling the Pharaoh and Black Forest sides with a switch alters the order of the gain flow.

The Coven gives you a complete range of overdrive base sounds. For instance, sounds ranging from subtle boost, using the dialed back side of the Black Forest, to the full-on Pharaoh fuzz.

Controls

• Overdrive:
  • Gain
  • Low
  • High
• Fuzz:
  • Fuzz
  • Tone
  • Germanium / Silicon / Bypass

The overdrive side of the pedal has gain, low, high, and volume knob controls and works as you would imagine.

The fuzz circuit has fuzz, tone high, and volume controls and there are also a number of toggle switches.

Generated fuzz with the GE / SI/ bypass switch – germanium or silicon clipping or bypass the clipping diodes.

The GE mode generates fuzz by clipping the signal using germanium diodes and this gives the classic fuzz style sounds from the sixties.

This is because germanium was used in semiconductors when they were first invented. They were subsequently replaced by silicon because they were “better”.

To be fair, at the time there were a lot of things going for silicon-based transistors over germanium, as it is more robust, but does sound different.

The SI mode generates fuzz by clipping the signal using silicon semiconductors. This gives a different, more “modern” sound because it is a higher gain.

The bypass mode, unsurprisingly, bypassed diode clipping and creates fuzz through overdriving an amplifier.

All three give different sounds, with even more flexibility gain as the Black Forest and Pharaoh sides of the pedal can be switched in and out.