Hamstead Subspace Intergalactic Driver £249
Ready to go Intergalactic? The Editor readies his (moon) boot
Fire up the thrusters, says McIver – this pedal has serious power
Why spend a sum equivalent to two new tyres for your van on a distortion pedal? Nowadays you can buy a noisy plastic stompbox from crappedals.com for the cost of a set of strings, pretty much. The answer is, of course, the same as it’s always been, which is to say that 1) a cheap pedal will give you a very short list of tone options, and 2) it will snap into 50 pieces when (not if) your intoxicated guitar player steps on it.
This leads us to the Subspace Intergalactic Driver, made by pedal designer Peter Hamstead and his team. With a name like that, we were hoping that it would be powered by dilithium crystals or at least a flux capacitor, but no, what we have here is simply a solid, all-analogue overdrive that gives the user a huge array of filthy sounds to play with.
The big knobs are mostly self-explanatory: Bass and Treble are the EQ, offering +/-18dB of boost, while Gain and Level do the obvious job. The latter offers 38dB of extra level and will make you jump if you roll it on too fast, so watch out. Parallel allows you to cut or boost the amount of dry signal, and Tone and Treble both affect the top frequencies in different ways. There’s an obvious tone difference when you compare them at maximum and minimum, but describing varying distortion profiles is tricky without using words like ‘squishy’ and ‘hollow’, so check the Hamstead YouTube channel for a clearer picture.
The real key to this unit is its tone-shaping, managed with three miniswitches. These give you a ton of options, far more in fact than a monkey brain like mine can easily handle. The C1/ C2/C3 switch determines the shape of the overall clipping: I found that C2 retained a dramatic amount of low end, but that C1 was smoother overall. The PR/EQ/PO switch places the drive before or after the EQ, or in clean boost mode if you wish; this is where really subtle tone-tweaking can take place if you so desire.
The real Neanderthal fun comes with the X1/X2/ X5 switch, which boosts your input level up to five times. On X5 the volume leap is huge, so watch out for your cab, neighbours, pets and nearby glassware. You can add an optical OptoKick footswitch if you want, but why would you?
The HSID is made of solid metal, the knobs and switches are suitably heavyweight and it sounds killer, so the only minor whine in this review is that it doesn’t come with a power supply. Still, you can’t have everything, and it does come with a five-year warranty and a nice velvety bag to carry it around in. Do investigate.