Mateus Asato pedalboard on a budget2021 documented board rebuilt for ≈ $391

The FUZZ is bought for its plurality: a silicon or germanium module dropped into the socket, then a parametric EQ to place whatever is in there. The SF300 is the rare fuzz at this price that also hands you a choice of voice and a tone stack to aim it — two saturation modes and a boost on a slide switch, with treble and bass either side of them.

Trade-off. The voices are not the same voices. The SF300 is a Super Fuzz-style circuit, thicker and more compressed than the Fuzz Face and Tone Bender lineages the FUZZ's modules answer to, and its two fixed bands are not a three-band parametric. The enclosure is plastic, and the reviews agree that gain and treble pushed together turn it harsh.

Both are optical compressors, and the detector is the part of the Bloom that does the work on a board like this one — it is what keeps fast picking intact instead of clamping it. The Yellow Comp adds a tilt EQ that moves the compression from bass-heavy to bright without disturbing the mids, so the tone-shaping half of the Bloom is at least gestured at.

Trade-off. One compression knob against six modes, a tilt control against three bands of active EQ, and nothing whatever in place of the Bloom's ramped 0-20 dB boost, which is the pedal's signature and half the reason people buy it. There is no blend, no attack setting and no MIDI. This row keeps the compression and gives up the console around it.

Underneath the four voices and the programmable boost, the Golden Boy is an early-nineties Marshall Bluesbreaker — the circuit the King Of Tone is also built on. The Blues Crab is that circuit for a fifth of the price, and it is the one budget clone that gets compared to an original rather than dismissed out of hand.

Trade-off. You get one of the Golden Boy's four clipping voices and none of its furniture: no active three-band EQ, no separate MOSFET boost in its own loop, no MIDI. The Blues Crab shares the original Bluesbreaker's modest output too, so it will push an amp far less than the pedal it replaces, and the enclosure is a micro box rather than something built for a tour.

Asato's signature pedal is, by Jackson Audio's own manual, a JCM800-derived distortion with a flat, touch-sensitive booster beside it and a Baxandall three-band EQ across both. Nothing analogue near this money is laid out that way, and the UK Gold 900 is the closest thing that is: two channels, volume and gain, and a full bass, mid and treble stack, modelled on the Marshall that followed the one the Asabi is drawn from.

Trade-off. It is a digital preamp model rather than an analogue drive, and a JCM900 is brighter and tighter than the JCM800 voice the Asabi chases. The cabinet simulation has to be switched out of the path before this goes near a real amp. The clipping presets, the gain cycle and the MIDI have no answer at all, and the transparent side of the Asabi now lives in the Bluesbreaker row above rather than in this box.

The EP103 is a digital emulation of an EP-3, and what people buy it for is the Age control: repeats that darken, saturate and drift as the tape wears. The Reecho's Tape Echo mode aims at the same thing and reaches a comparable delay length, with time, level and feedback exactly where you expect them.

Trade-off. One tape mode against a knob that runs from a fresh reel to a ruined one — you get one fixed idea of a worn tape rather than the whole range, and none of the all-analogue dry path Dunlop keeps under it. The micro enclosure leaves no room for the Echoplex's push-knob depth of control either, so what you dial is what you get.

This is the row the cheap market refuses to answer. The Flint is two amplifier effects in one enclosure, and the dedicated tremolo-and-reverb pedals start around a hundred and fifty dollars, with the ones voiced like a Flint priced like one. The MultiStomp gets there by being a computer instead: a tremolo running into a spring reverb is two of the six effects it will chain in a single saved patch, at a price no pedal built to do both jobs on its own comes near.

Trade-off. Everything the Flint does with two footswitches and five knobs, this does through a screen. One switch means the tremolo and the reverb cannot come and go independently under the foot, the controls are encoders and menus rather than dedicated knobs, and none of the Zoom's voices is the '61 harmonic tremolo or the '80s hall that the Flint is actually chosen for. It is the least faithful row here and the one worth upgrading first.