KMA Audio Machines Guardian Of The Wurm – Distortion & Noise Gate

KMA Audio Machines Guardian Of The Wurm

The KMA Audio Machines Guardian Of The Wurm, fuses the highly regarded Wurm Distortion and an ultra-fast Noise Gate. This makes the Guardian of the Wurm the perfect metal monster.

From chugging hard-rock, droning doom metal and grinding Swedish death metal, the beast abides.

But through its highly tweakable control set, the pedal can be tamed to provide real clarity to your riffs, making this the dirt pedal for metal, prog-rock, shoegaze, indie and beyond

Influenced by Boss HM2

Calling a pedal legendary or a cult classic is often stretching the truth. When it comes to the Boss HM-2 MIJ it’s absolutely on the money.

We’ve never tried to hide the fact that the Wurm Distortion is our unabashed sonic love letter to this filthy box of doom and gloom. It takes the essential ingredients of this classic, while in the process developing a way more flexible metal-distortion pedal.

While the Wurm absolutely nails that Swedish death-metal chainsaw sound, the pedal is adept for so many other genres.

To give you an idea, famous players like David Gilmour, Prince, Johnny Marr, Belinda Butcher, Lee Ranaldo, Daron Malakian and others have all made their mark with this style of distortion.

Additional Features

With Guardian of the WURM, we’ve evolved our take on this venerable circuit and added a bunch of really useful new features.

Whether you’re playing guitar, baritone, bass or synths through this pedal, we’re sure you’ll appreciate the immense flexibility on offer here. So let’s dig in.

Dual Band EQ

We of course kept the iconic active HM-2 dual-band EQ section, but added two more bands, giving a much wider range of tones to tailor your evil and gritty distortion sound.

Each band now has a dedicated centre-frequency control on the front of the pedal, allowing you to quickly and easily change and fine-tune your tone.

The EQ-Style mode, now also on the front of the pedal, helps you carve out even more tonal variation. Selecting HM-II mode will get you that classic ‘chainsaw’ high-mids character.

However, in KMA mode the EQ is a little more tonally balanced, less peaky and a bit wider in response.

Selecting both fattens and doubles up the tone stacking, allowing you to rank the lows and the high mids and rip that Swedish forest even more to shreds.

Drive Compression and Clipping

To adjust the extent of drive compression, you can choose between 3 different clipping styles. Silicon (Si) delivers the original compression, for rich harmonics and singing leads.

Asymmetric (A-S) increases the headroom and gives you more grit by retaining complex harmonics

In the Off position it lifts the sound of the Diodes for a slight compression and way more clarity, which is perfect for baritone guitars or bass.

Clean Blend

The Clean Blend feature helps to preserve your natural core tone.

Simply twist the Blend control o mix in the original signal, allowing the initial pick attack of your tone to breathe.

It is also especially useful when running the Guardian of the Wurm into an already distorted high-gain amp.

Noise Gate

When talking about high-gain, we all know drive circuits like this at full tilt can be noisy malice monsters. To get a grip on the potential noise floor, we designed a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use Noise Gate.

This is based on a high-performance Blackmer® VCA and provides lightning-fast and precise performance. Simply set the Threshold to taste via the GATE control and enjoy the silence.

• Fast palm-mutes? No problem.
• Decaying notes? Dead simple to accomplish.

For even more tweakability, we fitted an internal DIP switch to change the trigger-source from pre- or post-Distortion or even pre-Noise Gate.

Pre-Noise Gate?

Well, that’s because we added a TRS FX-Loop that works between the Distortion and the Noise Gate sections. This allows you to insert whatever fun noise-making pedals you might wish between them.

You can also use this feature to place the Noise Gate section in your amplifier’s FX-Loop.

Those who like to experiment with sound designs might even use the Noise Gate in other ways. For instance by using an external trigger source.

No problem, the Ect Trig jack hooks up to your source of choice.

In extreme settings, the Wurm can sometimes begin to feedback, which can’t even be suppressed by the Noise Gate.

To tame that high-frequency content, flip the internal dip-switch to activate the input filter to help smoothen things out. Yup, we did think of everything.

But wait, there is more! As the cherry on top, we added relay-based soft switches and also two different activation modes to suit the needs of different players.

The KMA Guardian Of The Wurm in “Independent mode” is exactly what it says on the tin.

Both sides of the pedal can be switched on and off independently via the Terror or Tame switches respectively.

However, in “Synced mode” the entire pedal is switched on and off via the Terror switch. In this mode the Noise Gate can also be switched in and out of the circuit as desired. Changing between modes is really simple to do.

Just hold down both switches while connecting the pedal to the power supply, and you’re good to go. Once set, KMA Audio Machines Guardian of the Wurm will remember the setting, even when powered off.

Controls

• Gain: Sets the amount of distortion
• Master: Sets the overall volume of the Wurm Section
• Gate: Sets the threshold of the Noise Gate
• Blend: Blends in the input signal, often called “Clean Blend”
• Clip-Style (Toggle-Switch)
  • SI (Silicon Diodes): The sound of the original HM-2 clipping
  • A-S (Asymmetrical): More grit and less compression
  • OFF (Lifted Diodes): Perfect mode for bass and baritone
• EQ-Style (Toggle-Switch)
  • HM-II: activates original HM-2 High Mids EQ with fixed centre-frequency
  • KMA: activates KMA-designed High Mids EQ with adjustable centre-frequency
  • BOTH: activates both EQ-Styles
• Low: Active Semi-Parametric EQ for low frequency boost (up)/ cut(down) with adjustable centre-frequency between 60-150 Hz via below potentiometer (midpoint: 90Hz)
• L-Mid: Active Semi-Parametric EQ for low-mid frequency boost (up)/ cut(down) with adjustable centre-frequency between 300 Hz -1,05 kHz via below potentiometer (midpoint: 490 Hz)
• H-Mid: Active Semi-Parametric EQ for high-mid frequency boost (up)/ cut(down)
  • EQ-Style “KMA”: with adjustable centre-frequency between 850 Hz-3 kHz via below potentiometer
  • EQ-Style “HM-II”: original HM-2 dual high-mid EQ with fixed centre-frequency
• High: Active semi-parametric EQ for high frequency boost (up)/ cut(down) with adjustable centre-frequency between 1.4-5 kHz via below potentiometer (midpoint: 2 kHz)

Footswitches

• Terror: Activates the High Gain Distortion and Noise Gate circuit or only the High Gain Distortion circuit depending on the Switching Mode
• Tame: Activates the Noise Gate circuit

So here it is. Crank it up and you will feel the rage of the ancient Wurm, while the Guardian will help you tame that beast when needed. Guardian of the Wurm is your perfect pairing for an evil and gritty tone that never gets out of control… unless YOU want it to!

Powered by an optional standard 9V DC (max.) PSU (negative center, 2.1mm, >150mA current draw)

Every pedal is made by hand in our small workshop. We use external manufactured PCBs to guarantee our high-quality standard and keep the price of our pedals reasonable. The use of an indestructible powder-coated die-cast enclosure ensures maximum durability.