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Plague Dogs is a Swedish chainsaw style distortion based on the DOD Death Metal with an added Distortion pot, buffered bypass and a reliable footswitch.
The Death Metal was originally designed by Jason Lamb in the 90's, whether it was intended to be a direct clone of the HM-2, the MT-2 or a hybrid between the both is unclear but there are settings that sound like both to my ears at least.
The original Death Metal has level, low, mid and high pots but no way to adjust the distortion. As gnarly and extreme as this is the added distortion knob makes this clone much more versatile than the original.
Why wasn't a distortion pot available on the original? My guess is it was a footprint issue, due to the 3 or 4 knob footprint that all the DOD enclosures had back then there was no room for distortion adjustment and being able to tweak the mids was more important.
This pedal doubles as a signal buffer. A Klon style buffered bypass was added to squash the oscillation feedback that happens with true bypass high gain pedals and also adds signal integrity to a signal chain.
The footswitch on the DOD pedals are notoriously unreliable, both for not always switching properly when engaged and also for failing. This version uses a modern footswitch that always switches when engaged and a low failure rate.
*Note* This pedal runs on a standard 9 Volt centre negative power supply which is not provided, for suggestions on power supplies see the info section.
Want to build the Death Metal yourself as a DIY project? PCB's available here