Saturday, March 16, 2024

OVERDRIVE- SONICAKE Shark Distortion ... 11 years old with 30 different names

SONICAKE|SHARK Distortion
$35.00 USD
This pedal showed up 11 years ago but it was called the Mooer Blade. A very high gain Metal pedal with a basic Thrash sound vibe. Since then if you give Mooer a call and ask Mooer to put your brand name on the pedal as long as you order 500+ they will do it. At last count 30 companies have done just that. 
They come and go but I expect as long as Mooer exists there will be one or two new on the list every year.
For the last couple of years Sonicake has the best price. Others could knock off $5 on a sale now and then but.... if you want them you can get the list here and look up every one than see if it has a video and check it out that it is not another Mooer pedal in an identically laid out box. I have done this. It took hours and hours.
As for the pedal the layout is volume, tone and gain with 3
levels of clipping dirt on a toggle.  
 
CONCLUSION ___ 
Except for lacking a lot of sustain it sounds quite good. It has a very good 
attack perfect for chugging. The detail in the sound of any really high gain 
pedal is very little but this is better than average. 
Yes if you spend years you can go through a dozen such pedals as your ears
focus on nano details. The best in this category is arguably the 
Empress Heavy Distortion at $330.00 USD It has 10 knobs and 4 switches, LOL.
You can get really high gain by stacking pedals. A Fuzz pushing an OD is a good start.
BUT ... for the money this could be damn useful to add to your mix of pedals. 
Use it alone or stack it, especially if you like a lot of genres of Metal.


5 comments:

  1. Are the Mooer rebrands exactly the same? What do you think of the Mooer e-lady? Is it the same as the Rowin LN-312 Flanger Mini?

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  2. The factory Mooer own to make these pedals is very high tech and computer controlled. It was designed by same people that designed 3 factories in China to make Mercedes Benz cars. The process is lightning fast. If Mooer were to dumb down parts or quality control they would have thousands of pedals that failed. It is much cheaper buying parts by literally the thousands to use quality parts then. They pay very little for parts . When I say quality I mean reliability well made parts. I do not mean military spec, LOL. So except for the paint on the casing all pedals are the same. Mooer can easily produce 500 or more pedals a day. Before I knew all this I bought 2 different brands of the same Mooer pedal. I actually took the guts out of both and swapped them from one casing to the other in minutes. I have a friend in Taiwan who distributes Mooer pedal for them in casings with different languages on them for the different countries all over Asia and some of the East European countries like Poland etc. He keeps me up to date on all the things going on in the pedal industry. Including the gossip. Things like Mooer is owned by one gut. He is married to the daughter of the guy that started Joyo. She now owns Joyo as he died. So pedals from Joyo are designed by Mooer but made by Joyo. They also own Flamma and make pedals for a lot of other companies that are Mooer designs but not clones in the same casings etc. Mooer often make more than one of thing.
    Yes the Mooer and the Rowin in the same casing are the same pedal. But Rowan sell a Nano Flanger and put the same LN-312 on it. It is NOT the same.

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  3. Thank you for your feedback. Do you mean that the LN-312 Is not the same as the LEF-612 that Is actually a rebranded e-lady ? Is it a good clone of the famous EHX pedal?

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  4. The LEF-612 is a Mooer e-lady. I believe the numbers changed when the Rowin brand name was bought from an owner in Hong Kong who bailed out when China took it over. You can find them labelled with either number. There is a Rowin LM612 too in a different casing. I would not count on it being the same although it may be. There is a store on AliExpress called Xikzic Official Store that had Rowin and several other brands that all sold the same pedal. They wanted about $18 to $20 USD depending on the brand.

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  5. Thanks.I will have a look at the store.Any recommendations ?

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