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Creation Audio Labs Holy Fire
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Recommended By
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Average Price
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Average Rating
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100% of reviewers
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None indicated
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9.0
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Description:
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Overdrive and distortion pedal. Made in USA, true bypass.
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Author
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bongomania
OVNIFX
Registered: October 2005
Location: PDX, OR
Posts: 30219
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Review Date: Mon June 29, 2009
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Would you recommend the product? Yes |
Price you paid?: None indicated
| Rating: 9
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Pros:
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beautiful, rugged, smooth natural sound, drives a power amp, many subtle drive variations possible, low noise, flat EQ
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Cons:
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special power supply, kind of boring tone, higher gain distortion not so great, flat EQ
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I directly A/B compared the Holy Fire against five other OD pedals, as well as of course my recollection of other OD's I've previously owned.
The Holy Fire has a terrific range of low-gain overdrive. It is very natural, warm, and smooth. Of all of the pedals here, the Holy Fire was best at putting "hair" on the sound, consistently on all notes, without otherwise altering the tone, without buzzing harshly, and without drawing attention to itself. There is no loss of low end, even with an active 5'er with the lows boosted; and the overall EQ shape of the effect is the closest to completely "flat" of all the pedals in this test. The down side to all of this is it wasn't very interesting or exciting sounding, and it took away some of the articulation of the clean signal.
At the highest distortion settings it is capable of some mean grind, but the lows were a bit weaker at that setting, and it was not the sort of grind you'd get from an SVT for example. At those extreme settings it sounded more like an average distortion pedal, whereas at the lower-gain settings it really has its own thing going on.
The construction quality is tops, really solid, and it's one of the best-looking overdrives out there. The words "Holy Fire" light up with an evil red glow, very cool. The footswitch is true bypass. The one thing that is a real bummer is it requires a special wall-wart power supply--it cannot be run off a typical brick or daisy chain supply. There are some pedals where that sort of power supply requirement is understandable and a "necessary evil" due to the voltage or amperage needed to achieve a certain amount of clean headroom or processing power. In this case, I'm not sure it's so easy to justify.
The controls are "G" gain, a simple volume control; "O" overdrive, for smoother fur and fatness; "D" distortion, for harder clipping; and "~" which is a tone control. The O and D are interactive, so a broad range of subtleties can be dialed in by adjusting both of them in relation to each other. It's worth your time to explore as many different O and D setting combinations as possible, because otherwise you might just try turning the overdrive up and down and maybe being disappointed by the results.
For my tastes I found I strongly preferred the pedals that had more "flavor" of their own, and which added more excitement to the sound. The Blueberry is a long-time favorite of mine for this purpose, and the Bogdan/Polish Love is one I'm borrowing and using for the first time, and loving it to where I have to buy one for myself now. But if your tastes and purposes, especially in the context of a recording studio, call for a more neutral tone that simply furs up and vintages-out your bass sound without adding a bunch of EQ and noise, then the Holy Fire will be perfect for you. It has more smoothness and a better/wider range of subtle variations in OD tone than any of the other pedals. Note that I'm not saying a wider range of tones, but rather a wider "sweep" across the limited spectrum of low gain drive and clean boost.
One neat feature of it that I've mentioned in another thread is that the Holy Fire does an excellent job of driving my Carvin DCM power amp. I could easily see somebody using the Holy Fire as their main preamp for any sort of gig that could use a lightly overdriven tone.
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