T-Rex Møller versus Way Huge Pork Loin: a lond and thorough comparison and review.

[V!N]

Once upon a thread, I promised to write a review about the Way Huge Pork Loin. I took one home, put it in an A/B loop switch with my favourite Overdrive pedal and then the review started to write itself while I tweaked every little knob and pot on both pedals. It grew into something that was far too large to use as an answer, so I'm going to give it it's own thread.

First of all, who am I to say anything about any pedal ? I'm an ex touring and recording musician and a spoiled brat when it comes to tone ! That's who I am .. :P
I occasionally work for music store that's about to become a large seller of high quality and boutique pedals in the Netherlands. It may not be the biggest one in the country yet, but they do have a lot and best of all, almost everything is demo ready in the shop. Most shops here are like "uh .. I've never heard of that pedal" or "Try it ? No way, pay now and I'll order it. Come back in a few months."
Apart from that, I'm a bit of a pedal and amp tech myself. If I don't like the sound, it's time to bring out the breadboard, and start experimenting until I'm satisfied. So, I think I should be able to write a review that might help a few people.

To just write a little something about the Way Huge Pork Loin would be rather limiting. So instead, I'm going to compare it to the T-Rex Møller, my current benchmark for all overdrive pedals. These two pedals share one key feature: they both have their own way to blend in a clean signal.
This is a recent trend in overdrive and compressor pedals, getting some clean sounds mixed in parallel with the effect to keep the open and clear nature of the sound. Also, it prevents the (over)compression that inevitably occurs when the gain is turned up higher and the signal starts to clip.

The guitars I used were a Warmoth Tele with a Seymour Duncan Broadcaster bridge and Five-Two neck and a Gibson The Paul with T-Tops into a Marshall Studio 15 tube amp.


Features

Way Huge Pork Loin

Volume and Overdrive work as they work on any other pedal with these knobs. Tone works a bit different here though, it's a variable low pass filter: You get the full tone at 10 and when you back it off, you kill the high end. Clean let's you dial something that Dunlop calls "warm British preamp glistening clean tones" .. more about that later. Finally, Curve is for "fine-tuning corner frequencies" of the overdrive. We'll get to that in a bit.
There are three internal trim pots and this is bound to scare of some players. Well, let me assure you these are not to be feared. There are only three of them and once you dialled the sound you like, you'll never have to touch them again. The original factory settings are in the manual, repeated on a big sticker inside the pedal and even if you messed up so badly that you lost both, they couldn't be easier to find: Filter on zero, Drive Mix on full and Presence right in the middle. The Presence pot has a centre-detent, so even my pet rock would find the middle.
Filter is for the Voice of the clean part of the pedal, drive lets you dial in the amount of overdrive into the complete sound and presence the amount of top high in the overdrive.


T-Rex Møller

The Møller is an expanded version of the T-Rex Alberta, which is an improved Tube Screamer. The Møller takes a much more down to earth approach everything that the Pork Loin is doing. Gain, Level and Tone should be pretty much self explanatory and work like you'd expect them to work. There's a Voice switch that can add some beef to single coils if you want some. It has a Mix knob that lets you create a blend of the clean undistorted signal and the distorted overdrive signal.
There's an additional clean boost, controlled by a volume knob and foot-switch. I'll leave that out of the equation when judging the sound of these two pedals, but I would like to add that this is a very neat and handy extra feature !



Clean

Way Huge Pork Loin

As mentioned earlier, the clean part of this pedal is voiced like a British preamp. It's hard for me to hear a specific preamp in there with a distinguished British accent, so let's forget about that and just focus on what tone it gives. The little Clean knob on the outside controls the volume of this clean sound in the mix and the Filter trim pot inside controls the tone. With Filter on 0, there's no additional bass, just a boost in the high-mids and a bit of treble with more complexity to it than just turning the mid and treble knobs on your amp higher. Dial in more of the filter and you get more bass until those sweet high-mids disappear around 4 or 5. The sound looses its complexity around here and becomes dull. From there on, the highs disappear until it's mostly bass and low-mids. This was even too dark for the bridge pickup on my Tele !
Somewhere between 0 and 4, I found all the sounds that I liked. 1 for The Paul neck, 2 for The Paul bridge, 3 for Tele neck and 4 for Tele bridge. If I had to choose only one setting, I'd probably put it on a compromising 3,5 and only use it with the Tele. The The Paul has enough beef and complexity of its own while the Tele could do with a little extra more.


T-Rex Møller

The clean bit of the overdrive part of this pedal (NOT the clean boost part) works in a different way. To get it to be clean, turn the Mix knob all the way down and There you have it, just your clean signal. But it's not completely "dry." When you increase the gain, to sound starts to grow more hair on its arms. You get some beef and the natural complex harmonics like you'd get from a sweet sounding tube amp on the verge of breaking up. Yet, it stays clean. You don't get any distortion on it, even if you put the gain on 10.



Overdrive

Way Huge Pork Loin

This part of the pedal is controlled by Overdrive, Curve and tone (high-cut) on the outside and an internal trim pot for Presence.
Overdrive is the gain knob and the presence was surprisingly easy to dial in: just start at 10 and it's an icepick in your ear. Then back it off until it works with your guitar and amp and it's no longer all that harsh piercing high. It didn't matter what other settings were used or if I used the neck pickup on the The Paul or the bridge pickup on the Tele. When I got rid of the icepick, it was done, done, done and worked with both guitars on all positions of the pickup selector switches.
The Curve knob is an odd thing to shape your tone with. On 10, there's enough bass, a slight dip in the mids and nice treble. Turned down, the highs start to disappear and the mids come back in, kind of a flat and dull sound. Then closer to 0, the bass and low-mids rule the sound and some of the treble returns. All this tone shaping takes place in the signal path before the distorting, so these powerful low-mids help to push it further into saturation. I did adjust the bass on my amp for this to prevent it from going muddy and it was a great sound. This is not ideal because that made it an always-on pedal. All your bass is in the pedal, turn it off and the bass is gone.
Dunlop calls the Pork Loin a "Soft Clip Injection" device. And soft it is ! A Tube Screamer almost sounds "aggressive" compared to this one. It's warm and fuzzy and there's ample gain for blues and (not too hard) rock. The breakup is early and soft and quite hard to clean up with pick attack and volume knob on the guitar. This was a bit disappointing if I'm honest. I was constantly looking for the compromise on the Tele between not being able to go clean enough and not having enough gain when playing full out. With the The Paul, cleans were even less of an option.


T-Rex Møller

What can I say about this pedal that hasn't been said before. It's everything you'd expect after buying yet another Tube Screamer clone, but you never got it .. Never, until the Møller hit the market. It's warmer, more open, more natural, more responsive, more clear, more transparent .. It's the ultimate evolution of the Tube Screamer circuit.
When using this with the Mix knob on 10 (no clean sound blended in) it already sounds more open than most other high end overdrive pedals out there.



Mix of Clean and Overdrive

Way Huge Pork Loin

You create your own mix by using the Clean knob on the outside and internal trimpot for Overdrive volume. This makes it tricky to operate and find your sweet spot, but it sure is there for those who are patient. I found it best to leave the internal pot for Drive Mix on its factory setting (10) and dial in the clean tone with the Clean knob on the outside of the pedal, but keep it very low.
With the Drive Mix lower, it was almost impossible to find the right blend of the two. With the cleans up too high, it sounded like I nicely fattened up the tone of my clean sound, but I could hear the same thing I was playing distorted in the background. Sudden loud pick attacks didn't give much of a boost in volume to the overdrive, only a bit more distortion. However, the Clean side of this pedal is indeed just as clean as any other clean booster. Sudden loud pick attacks produced sudden loud clean notes or chords that were louder than the distorted sound: imagine playing some nice softly crunching riffs and than dig in deep with your pick for a lead lick and .. you hear your lick loud and clean with some distortion going on in the background. Lesson to be learned: the Drive Mix should be left on 10, the way it left the factory. Then you should blend in the clean.
It is stated in the manual that you could turn Drive Mix all the way down to 0 and then use the pedal as a clean tone shaping and boosting device. That's the only other good setting for this knob: 10 or 0, on or off. They could make that an external switch instead of an internal trim pot for the next version.


T-Rex Møller

The T-Rex Møller uses a far simpler approach to do this. I already mentioned the clean sound is the same as the sound of the overdrive, only without distortion. This means it will always sound right and not a completely new sound that doesn't suit the sound of the overdrive. Further, the overdrive on the Møller isn't really that compressed compared to the Pork Loin and other overdrive pedals on the market today.
The most important difference is that its mix knob works for both the clean and the overdrive sound. You can turn it from 0 to 10 and get nothing but the best and most useful blends of the two:
0: all clean
5: clean and overdrive both equally on
10: all overdrive
I personally found the best settings from 3 to 6 if I wanted an open sound and 10 for a more thick, raunchy and compressed tone.



The Verdict

Way Huge Pork Loin

I think the idea behind the Pork Loin is awesome, but there are too many variables on this pedal to make it work for most guitarists. Less experienced and less patient musicians (not to mention those who are intimidated by a lot of knobs) will have to spend a lot of time before they find the tone they're after. It's like a Mesa/Boogie, you know the sound is in there somewhere, but with so many variables that are so interactive, it takes time to find the exact settings on ALL knobs to get to that awesome sound.
This pedal can help those die hard humbucker players who expect miracles from their single coils, but never got it without the help of a pedal. With humbuckers, its effect is less noticeable. Probably because those already have plenty of the "miraculous" sound that this pedal brings to the party.


T-Rex Møller

The Møller on the other hand has less variables, but exactly everything you need. It's basic and understandable for everybody. The knobs here work interactive as well, but at least you're 80% on your way to the sound that works best for you within the first two or three minutes of trying. The rest should come along as you play with it some more and learn how to use it. Best of all, you don't have to go through a whole bunch of "bad" sounding settings to try and find the perfect setting for you. It goes equally well with humbuckers and single coils thanks to the voice knob. The key to this pedal is that it works perfect in a setup with a great guitar and a great amp that just needs that little something extra that you can't get from other pedals.
I used the Møller as a benchmark, simply because I think it's the best overdrive pedal out there at this moment. After testing it side by side with an overdrive that uses a different, modern and way more difficult approach to get same goal, I can only say that less is more: it's better to have five knobs and a switch that sound great in most positions than seven internal and external knobs that sound great in few positions.

If I had to choose between these two, it should be clear by now that the Møller has won this battle for me. If I had to choose a pedal for just the Tele and could pick any pedal out there excepting the T-Rex Møller and Alberta, the Pork Loin would certainly live to fight another day. I'd say it beats the OCD and the MXR Zakk Wylde when it comes to the clean sound and tone shaping. The overdrive ? I'm not so sure about that yet, but at least I'd have a killer tone shaping device to beef up those single coils !


To Conclude

To conclude, I'd like to say this was a fun experiment ! It's good to see new things are still being developed and not everything is a clone of everything else. I feel the Pork Loin is still in its infancy, it's a pedal with great potential and I hope that on later models, they solved the issues that I encountered during this test.

After all, there are almost thirty years between the birth of the TS-808 circuit and T-Rex adapting of it into the Møller with many, many trial and error clones and adaptations of various brands in between.

[siore]

Gotta love the T-rex pedals.

[mizer357]

that was quite a review. thanks for taking the time putting that together.

[snaredrum]

good stuff man, i was looking into this stuff a few weeks ago and didn't know which way to go. this makes me think the moller is the way forward - i just wish it wasn't so darned expensive over here... :thumb

[PGblues]

Thank you very much Vin!

[V!N]

Thanks lads. It took quite a bit of time to write down everything I heard, felt and experienced during the comparison.

[Lampens]

Nice, What is that store you are working for?

[st.bede]

thank you

[cynic79]

I wanted to say that I really appreciate the review V!N. I was considering the Pork Loin as an overdrive pedal after getting the Fat Sandwich, but your review made me realize I was looking for something a little different. Thanks for saving me some cash!

As you noted in my thread, we both seem to agree that the new line of Way Huge pedals take a bit of time to dial in. The Fat Sandwich is an excellent distortion pedal, and it sounds good with everything at noon, but moving the controls around exerts a huge change in the sound, and it can take some time to dial in exactly the sound you're looking for. Still, I was impressed with the sound of the pedal and would recommend the Fat Sandwich to anyone looking for a distortion pedal to run in front of a clean amp.

[st.bede]

I am going to pick up one of those fat sandwich pedals. this vid made me think...hmmmm...I need to check one out: (starting around 3:05 is when I knew)

YouTube - Dunlop Fat Sandwich

YouTube - Dunlop Fat Sandwich

[cynic79]

The Fat Sandwich is most definitely a fat sounding pedal!