Tom and I both bought Electro Harmonix Small Stone phasers towards the end of last year, and both of us came to the same conclusion: it’s a great-sounding pedal, but the volume drop that happens when you turn the pedal on is a royal pain in the arse.  I could work around it when using my Trace Elliot amp because that has configurable input and output gain on the effects loop.  However, my Session amp doesn’t have that facility, so when I used the Small Stone with it I added an overdrive pedal to boost the level back up.  This, of course, results in a bit of a tap-dance session prior to using the phaser, which is distinctly non-ideal.  I’d heard that it was possible to get the pedal modified by Analogman, so dropped it off at Panic Music when I sent my amp in for repair assuming they could do a similar job.  They surprised me by quoting me about fifty quid for the modification, which seemed way too expensive.

Fast forward to this year and the idea of getting the pedal modified popped back into my head again (read: I was bored at work).  Hunting around on the net, I spotted in the uk.music.guitar archives that someone had sold a Small Stone pedal modified to have unity gain, and that the person who had done the work had recently started Tipton Amplification.  I dropped Tipton a line, who quoted me a far lower price than Panic had, and so within a week I had the modded pedal back in my sticky mitts.  It’s fantastic; unity gain whether on or off, and better signal-to-noise ratio than before.  So to celebrate my entry into unihibited phasing heaven, I recorded a little tune; check it out here.