Demo: Devi Ever Super Soda Meiser

Nick Reinhart here, checking in with the pedal world. This is gonna be a pretty cool and not-so cool Pedals And Effects post. It's pretty cool because we're jamming the Devi Ever (but sort of Dwarfcraft) Super Soda Meiser fuzz pedal. I think i go over the details in the video below, but just in case you wanna skip over our banter (why would you wanna do that?) here's the deal with this guy- one day Ben Hinz, of Dwarfcraft, surprised me with a custom, one-off pedal with my name printed across the front. This was pretty mind blowing. 

The "Reinhart" was a two-in-one freaked out fuzzer. I believe it was a Great Destroyer Fuzz + Hax Ring Mod. I remember Ben explaining the different circuits to me and to get the great destroyer section to sound "normal" you had to dime every knob, which was amazing. Things get extra cool when you start dialing back the starve and gain controls. Really neat circuit, and the Hax is a wacky ring mod that sounds insane when combined with the Great Destroyer. Both can be run independently. I ended up using this pedal a lot on the Big Walnuts Yonder record i made with Nels Cline, Mike Watt and Greg Saunier (it's currently being mixed FYI). There are a couple of very crucial parts that were created with this thing. The engineer, Tony Maimonie (from freakin Pere Ubu!) was losing his mind over some of the sounds we got out of it.

Anyways, wait- this post is about the Super Soda Meiser, isn't it?? Oh yea. So later down the line Ben asked me if i'd want to do a short run of Reinhart pedals for the freaky fuzzheads out there. While I loved the pedal, the problem i was having was the price point. There was a lot that had to go into making this guy and the retail price was a bit too high for me to feel comfortable about. I can rarely afford to spend $300 on a pedal. In fact, i'm not sure that I've ever spent that much on a pedal. If i remember correctly the price we'd talked about was somewhere around there, possibly even a bit more. and like i said, that just made me feel a little weird- if I couldn't afford it myself i wouldn't feel right wanting other's to pay that much, even though it was WELL worth the cost. Just some psychological crap on my end I couldn't get past. 

So we went back to the drawing board. At that point Ben had purchased Devi Ever and was doing new and previous circuits/pedals. One that he had shown me was the Soda Meiser. I had mentioned how it'd be cool if the "chaos" switch could be controlled via a momentary foot switch. So he put together a prototype (as seen in the video) with the vertical casing now flipped on it's side (to make room for the second switch) and i just loved it. he also threw in what he calls a "drone" knob, which is more of a self oscillation function as opposed to the more traditional drone sound one might think of. I did some artwork for it and boom we had a pedal. 

So now onto the reason for this post being partially not cool. The original run of Super Soda Meisers came in surf green and was limited to 75. Those sold out in less than 24 hours. My mind was blown. Juan and I didn't even have enough time to do a video for it, I had no idea that people would be so into it. After a few months there were still lots of inquiries about it and we decided to do another run, this time in a light pink and limited to 50. Those were also gone pretty quickly as i recall. So I guess the thing that's not so cool is that by the end of reading this post and watching the video you may find yourself wanting to check out a Super Soda Meiser and that might prove to be a bit difficult. Ben had DIY circuit kits available for awhile, but I believe those have also been discontinued. So for now if you want one you'll have to scour the fuzz community for someone who purchased one and then plugged it in and was like, "whoa, this is too much for me" or whatever and wants to unload that sucker. 

So that's the Super Soda Meiser for ya. who knows, maybe we'll do another round of 50 one of these days. For now, Reverb.com is your best bet!

-Nick