Hello Gearheads! Welcome back to another great day where I have the supreme pleasure to share cool gear with you all! Today’s feature is none other than the brutalist beauty of the Kogoy Musical Devices HSL9000! John Kogoy is the mysterious man behind the curtain at Kogoy Musical Devices. Hailing from Hendersonville, North Carolina, Kogoy keeps a moderately low profile while cooking up some of the most interesting and in demand pedals in today’s flourishing boutique market.
I first came across Kogoy’s designs and ultimately the HSL9000 we’re looking at today, via his Instagram account and the guitarist JD Simo. Simo was using the HSL9000 for a long while as his favorite fuzz of choice and in many ways it helped jump start Kogoy’s production and at the very least create a great awareness to his fantastic designs. You can reach Kogoy via Instagram at @kogoymusicaldevices and at times has stock at East Side Music in Nashville, TN.
All of Kogoy’s pedals are rooted in historical tonal landscapes and they all exhibit something special in the feel, touch and timbre… a sign of great ears and inspired design. I personally own a few other great designs, his Rainbow Sound and a Germanium Fuzz. All fantastic circuits that call for you to just make music.
So… what’s the deal with today’s feature you say!? Well, the HSL9000 is deceptively on paper a fun glitchy fuzz pedal and distorter capable of smashing your ears and your neighbor’s atoms… but hidden within it’s controls are many shades of drive, boost and musical gain. The HSL9000 is after all a music maker as I mentioned ever so hyperbolic in this article’s title. The truth is though… I borrowed a local friend’s HSL9000 for a few days and was completely amazed at it’s ability to sound broken, brazen, glitched out and gated and at the same time with a few shifts of the knobs, musically rich and sweet. Coaxing overdriven and boosted tones that sound familiar and inspired.
At it’s core, the HSL9000 reminds me (just a guess) of a highly modified or rather controlled Big Muff design with the ability to torment it or wrap it in sweetness. You can make it gate and “fart out”, you can make it thin or fat, you can make it huge or small… you can even add in some octave madness to the tone. There are so many tones and feeling that emote from this utility looking box that it warrants many hours of experimentation. It’s equally great at being your only fuzz device and at the same time a great studio tool for any instrument that uses a 1/4” cable. It appears I have many Yin and Yang descriptors here and that really does play to the strengths the HSL9000 exhibits.
“Controls include Volume, Tone (interacts closely with Volume), Gain, Pre (controls a preamp which overdrives the main distortion stage), Bias (fully clockwise = wide open, turning left results in gating and other interesting effects). But the tweaking doesn’t stop there—also included are two switches for Crisp/Flub (a slightly brighter filter to emphasize guitar, and a slightly darker filter to emphasize bass, respectively) and A/B (“A” being a more traditional, highly saturated fuzz, and “B” which is similarly saturated but introduces more synthesizer-like attack and decay, with some additional sustain and emphasis—you’ll notice that “B” allows you to dial the Bias knob even further to the left). The possibilities are ENDLESS. ”
In the demo below I used the HSL9000 on all the stringed instruments including bass. In fact, I loved the way it interacted with bass so much that wrote this piece with the bass guitar and added everything else stacked on top. It’s a magnificent device that truly asks to be experimented with. I highly suggest you check one out and everything else Kogoy has to offer. There is a bit of a wait for most of his pedals, but there are periodic drops that he’ll have at retailers like East Side Music Supply.
Thanks for checking this Gearheads Feature on the Kogoy Musical Devices HSL9000. If you’d like to learn more about Kogoy Musical Devices please do check out the site below for more information.
https://www.instagram.com/kogoymusicaldevices
Until next time Gearheads, please take a moment to Like, Subscribe & Share this Feature and I’ll see you all very soon!