IF YOU ARE an effects pedal (and I know I am), there are three popular ways to hipness — you can be a reverb, you can be programmable, or you can be American. Welcome, then, to deep-fabness in the form of these Dod pedals, the first of their kind in the country and they came straight to us, we'll have you know.

FX45 STEREO REVERB: £175.95

As opined in our August NAMM report, reverb, cheap and digital, is set to be the next 'big thang'. Dod's candidate sits in a wine red, mini-sized floor pedal, powered by a single PP3 under a clip-off cover.

As with the other two Dods, the foot switch is a remarkably light actioned back plate that dips by only a millimetre to make contact, then stops. Very gentle on the feet.

A trio of tightly packed controls offer variations on 'reverb level', 'reverb time' and 'room size'. The first is self explanatory, boosting the mix of the reverbed signal against its dry half (and producing noticeable noise at the farthest end of its travel — lesson one: back off).

The second alters the reverb's duration — how long it takes to die away into the distance. The third, rather more difficult to pin down, sets the dimensions of the imaginary space in which you're sounding your instrument. For example, a small room bounces sound vibrations back from the walls faster than a larger room would do. But for how long those signals continue to bounce around has more to do with the material from which the room is constructed — stone would keep it up, curtaining would clamp it down — and that's the territory of the reverb time control. As always such parameters are psycho-acoustically interactive — ie, the best results come from fiddling with both knobs.

The FX45 does not approach the cavernous decay of a spring reverb unit (where usually, all you have control over is the amount of reverb signal, not its delay or size characteristics). The Dod, as the knobs imply, is a room maker, if a less sophisticated one than rack mounted studio reverbs. You can describe small rehearsal rooms, garages, church halls, but maybe not the churches themselves. Stretch it out too long and the FX45 starts to adopt a clangy tone, akin to the bathtub ring of a flanger at the far end of its travel. Only slight, but if you compared the Dod to a spring reverb at the longest times, you'd probably prefer the smoothness of the latter.

But for live, real room feels, the FX45 comes out ahead of its springy rival. It seemed happiest with guitars and voices (very percussive keyboard voices could accentuate the clang). Low notes tended to generate a resonant note on the largest room settings. The OTT office noticed this the most on rhythm box bass drums that suddenly found their own, accompanying, bass guitar note, the pitch being dependent on the room size setting. The bass player in the office thought it might be off putting to have to fit in with this rhythmic drone. The rest of us thought it was a dead ringer for 'Relax'. Could this be the Horn method?

FX56 AMERICAN METAL: £75.95

Were a pedal ever so well named? The fat, well-rounded distortion this 56 invokes is thicker than a McDonald's Milkshake and can be heard across dozens of Heavy American albums. Y'know the stuff; lead lines that sustain for minutes and are the fuzz equivalent of four inch pile carpet.

Three knobs again, this time presenting level, presence and distortion. The presence can take the tone from softest, to soft, to a bit brighter, but in truth the Dod is not the most versatile distortion unit. Most of the time you can just tell the difference between neck and tail pickups.

But no matter as the 56 performs its single namesake sound irrepressibly making combos imitate stacks and two strings do the work of 12. A touch of reverb helps round it out, but if it got much heavier you'd have a minor black hole on stage.

PDS1550 PROGRAMMABLE DISTORTION: £149.95

An altogether wilder animal. Two distortion units in one, with the principal fuzz section having its own parametric EQ and a slapback delay you can tweak by removing the baseplate.

It's yellow (canary) and twice the width of the other two units, bearing two footswitches — the first to bring the effect in or out, the second to swap between fuzz A and fuzz B. The simplest — B — has straightforward level and gain controls turning out out a happily dirty little fuzz tone, more like an overworked amp than the preceding American's weighty sustain.

A is where the invention comes in. It has its own level and gain controls plus three others for the parametric-frequency (100 to 3700Hz), octaves (more commonly known as the bandwidth) concluded by cut boost which performs the expected tasks depending on its movement to the left or right.

As with the majority of parametrics, you could induce fairly unpleasant noises if you insisted on working at the extremes. But sensible tweaking in the mid ranges can peak up the tone, pick out certain harmonics, or ease it down into the sultrier areas. Definitely helps to set it apart from B.

However, the programmable bit comes from removing the four crosshead screws holding the rubber coated back plate in place. In the midst of the chip bedecked circuit board is a small, blue, plastic package revealing seven tiny white slide switches (the end of a ball point will flip them over). These set up the programmable parameters and although there's no memory involved (you can't recall different 'patches' á la synth voice) you can at least set up the 1550 to your personal preference.

Maximum delay time for the inbuilt slapback echo is 40ms (both switches down), cut to 20ms (switch one up) and 10ms (both switches up). You'd be surprised how much 'dirtier' you become just from hearing yourself again 40ms later. The PDS sounds big in a grubby, raw, thoroughly disreputable and distinctly 'live' way as compared with the American's method of size through fatness. One's rude, the other's polite.

At 40ms you get the maximum, clamourous thrash that the Dod can turn out, which reduces to a more controllable liveness at 20ms (Hammersmith Odeon instead of Wembley) and tighter still at 10ms (church hall, maybe). The third switch disconnects the programming section altogether (the seventh turns off just the delay), while four and five bring in extra high cut and boost filters which can be trimmed by a small, screwdriver-turned pot further along the circuit board. More top or tameness available here, always worth having. More effective still is ever-so-weeny switch no. 6 which drops in a bass boost, highly advantageous in thickening up the lower notes and taking a lot of the credit for the wallop that the Dod puts across.

So what have we got? One of the more violent sounding distortion units I've ever heard, capable of two sounds at once, and offering tweak potential which can at least make your 1550 sound different from half a dozen others in the same room. Lot of money if you think of it as a normal fuzz box: more sensible if you regard it as a mini-studio for overdrive.

CONTACT: Rhino Music Spares, (Contact Details).