Earthquaker Devices Palisades Guitar Pedal

Earthquaker Devices said they would never make this pedal, but now that it’s arrived, the Palisades has written the final chapter in the Tube Screamer codex.

Throughout pedal history, much ado has been made of the volumes of Tube Screamer modification lore—the mods are almost as old as the pedal themselves. From juiced input capacitors and buffer omission to onboard boosts and every flavor of diode clipping, the roads are well-traveled. Original TS808 engineer Susumu Tamura could not have foreseen the vast amount of knowledge dedicated to his craft, but it’s clear that due to the amount of refinement that has occurred in the decades since, the Tube Screamer is one of the effects world’s royal circuits. The sound is and has remained timeless for over 40 years, and now Earthquaker Devices has composed the unquestioned reference manual, the yardstick to which all other Tube Screamers can now be measured.

The Palisades hosts a dizzying array of options, none of which detract from the goal of exhausting the Tube Screamer’s potential. Popular mods such as a brightness switch and buffer bypass are certainly present. However, Earthquaker has also ventured where few have dared to tread with the addition of two rotary switches to control the value of the input capacitor (labeled “Bandwidth”) and the clipping diode configuration (labeled “Voice”). Most Tube Screamer variants that choose to include these options do so with a toggle switch, two positions for two different capacitors and three positions for clipping, the center of which is typically a diode lift, meaning no clipping. With the implementation of five- and six-way rotary switches—for Bandwidth and Voice, respectively—Earthquaker has greatly expanded the options that lie at the user’s fingertips.

Of course, Earthquaker isn’t simply content with a couple of rotary switches and the like; they’ve also added two separate gain channels—A and B—that the player can toggle via a footswitch. And not to be outdone by literally any pedal on the market, a boost is also included which can be activated via a third footswitch. Effectively, this turns the Palisades into four different Tube Screamer configurations on a player’s pedalboard at once—Gain A with or without boost and Gain B with or without boost. Add in the Voice, Bandwidth, Buffer and Bright switches and the number of combinations becomes a staggering 480. Truly, the Palisades is a Tube Screamer for the ages and beyond.

Five-way bandwidth selector, from leaned out to robust
Six-way clipping switch, featuring silicon, asymmetrical, LED, MOSFET, Schottky and diode lift
Buffer on/off
Brightness switch
Two independent footswitchable gain channels
Footswitchable boost circuit
-9vdc operation