As some of you know I'm a bit of a Rat pedal fan, I like all versions of this pedal RatII, Dirty Rat, Turbo Rat, Vintage Rat etc. and this pedal, the ProCo Brat, is the younger cheaper brattier (discontinued) version of the Rat.... when I saw it going for an utterly stupid price on ebay I just had to buy it.
Now this pedal gets a lot of bad press all over the internet and personally I don't really think much of it is justified. (unless it doesn't sound like you want it to, which is hardly the pedals fault!) I guess the look of it is a personal taste thing, but I think it looks great in it's 80's inspired daylow finish... pink, orange and yellow.. seriously, it doesn't get much better than that! The whole thing feels pretty robust and heavy, the pots feel a little 'wobbly' but nothing really to worry about and the plastic plunger on the footswitch could easily be kicked off I suppose.. but it's lasted this long so far so I'm not gonna worry about that. The volume knob goes from 'less' to 'more' the tone goes from 'flat' to 'fat' and the distortion knob goes from 'mush' to 'crunch' (proco's words not mine!) and you can get a pretty wide range of tones from it.
The sound of this pedal is bloody great in my opinion and lives up to it's name, it's a beautiful bratty 'in your face' distortion perfect for Punk rock and Garage rock and to me there's enough 'rattiness' to make it part of the same family but also sounding different enough to make it worthwhile having both. It's based around the LM308N op-amp like the original rat but I guess the difference in sound is the Rat is a much smoother sounding pedal, this fella has a bit more of a nasty edge. ... so probably not for the blues or classic rock players. (unless of course your idea of blues is The White Stripes, then it would be perfect!)
....anyway, I've not bought a production pedal for quite a while so I just wanted to show this off!! I'm really pleased with it. :)
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