References to Family Guy’s Glenn Quagmire notwithstanding, Giggity ($149 street) is a decidedly highbrow affair that’s designed to juice up your tone via a savvy combination of voicing, EQ, and gain circuitry. Billed as an “analog mastering preamp for guitar,” Giggity features a Plexiglas panel with five controls. Uppermost is a 4-position preamp selector knob, which has “sun” and “moon” settings at the opposite ends of its range. Clicking between these brighter and darker positions adjusts the gain and voicing of the circuit to optimize Giggity for cleaner or more overdriven sounds. From there, the Body control cuts or boosts the low-mid and upper-bass frequencies, while the Air knob does the same for the highs (either control yields a flat response when set to “noon”). Giggity also has a Loudness knob for adjusting preamp input gain and a Master for controlling the final output.

Giggity can be placed first in line to refine the sound of your guitar and/or hit the amp with a hotter signal to push it more easily into overdrive (there’s plenty of output to do this). The device is great for giving single-coil pickups humbucker-like heft, so if your idea of Stratocaster nirvana is buttery distortion à la Eric Johnson, Giggity will definitely help you get there. Giggity can also be put after a string of effects, where you might use it to remove top-end fizziness from a high-gain pedal or perhaps create some amp-like distortion ahead of a clean amp. In this mode, Giggity can instantly make your whole rig sound girthier, which is particularly helpful in lower-volume situations.

For testing, I put Giggity downstream from a couple of distortion effects (a Dunlop Jimi Hendrix Fuzz Face and a Hermida Nu- Valve), a Rocktron VII Deadly Sins autowah, a Whirlwind Orange Box phaser, and an Analog Man ARDX20 analog delay. The output from Giggity went straight to a Fender Deluxe Reverb.

With the Deluxe running clean, I started off by setting the 4-position switch two clicks away from the “moon” position and dialed the Body and Air controls to around 11:00 and 1:00 respectively. The Loudness control was turned up enough to create some fat breakup with the guitar volume cranked, and the Master was set for a slight volume boost. I wasn’t surprised by the suddenly beefier tone from the rear pickup of a PRS Modern Eagle II, but the Fuzz Face was also smoother and creamier sounding through Giggity. In fact, all the pedals sounded cooler when slammed into Giggity at moderate to higher gain (Loudness) settings—sort of like you’d expect when running them into a cranked tube amp.

Putting the 4-position switch on the “sun” position, lowering the Body and Loudness settings, and turning up the Air control slimmed the tone, put more sparkle in the highs, and made the delay repeats sound clearer—all very nice for a crystalline rhythm sound. Noteworthy too is that Giggity does what it does without changing the core sound of your guitar and effects, and it’s extremely quiet too. Color me impressed. Pedals come and go pretty routinely on my board, but Giggity now has a permanent place at the table!

Kudos A super tone shaper for guitar.
Concerns None.
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