So far I have only found one downside when zapping through the modes, it is that some modes (Wave cannon I am looking at you) are significantly louder than others, so kneeling in front of your loud 4*12 while switching can result in Marty McFly moments. This pedal is a keeper just for this mode. Ridiculous amounts of gain, tight definition, fuzz without being fuzzy, simply a supercool distortion sound. To me, the value add for non-Rat enthusiasts is in the Landgraff mode alone: this is simply awesome. I may be missing some mojo (additional harmonics and haunting mids etc) but that is almost certainly just my nerd-brain making things up. The OG/white face of course can be made to sound the same so there is no real benefit to having them except for the historian aspect, but they sound like a Rat should sound, despite all of the switching complexity the noise floor is not higher than a simple Rat. What can I say, it is pretty good and a must-buy for a Rat enthusiast I think. So I pre-ordered a Packrat and it arrived some days ago. When Josh introduced the Packrat, I was totally floored by the accompanying 'history of the rat' YT documentary - I am partial to the guy but his love and meticulousness (meticulosity? I don't know, I am no native English speaker) really deserves praise. Since the recent renaissance of the circuit (over here in Europe largely fueled by JAM (Rattler) and over in the US by others, the big boys have also followed suit (Wampler Ratsbane etc) and that finally led me to dig up my old Rats, buy the recent ones like the addict I am and embark again on a Rat journey (since moving on from the Mesa Pre's to more Marshall-inspired stuff I relegated the old Rat collection to storage because FullDrive, OCD, Tim, KoT etc). That was in the early 2000s and at the time I used a big box rat and 2 R2DUs (which I think are the best sounding ones at least in my collection). The main components of the cleverly constructed set are sculptural curves that suggest blades of grass and can be reconfigured to indicate varied locations and projections that most often give an abstract suggestions of place but also include some elegantly spare animation.One could say I am a Rat fan since I discovered that a rat was perfect to drive my Mesa Studio Pre's into mega tight and at the same time massive wall-of-sound distortion - gain 9 o'clock, filter 1 o'clock, volume nearly dimed. One sequence creates a sense of scale by using silhouette puppets, and the presentation of the humans as faceless beings with huge, disproportionate cowboy hats and appendages lends an appropriate sense of the animals' perspective. The primary packrat, rabbit, and squirrel puppets boast an appealingly textured look with an open center that suggests a rib cage, while in dream sequences, the puppets appear more like outlines or living line art. PackRat features the work of a talented group of puppeteers (Carlo Adinolfi, Sabrina DeWeerdt, Maggie Gayford, Jenny Hann, Kayla Prestel, and Alanna Strong) who bring the characters to expressive life and strike a compelling balance between anthropomorphized and studiedly realistic movement. L-R: Alanna Strong & Maggie Gayford (Owls) Jenny Hann (Firestone) Carlo Adinolfi (Bud), Happy Kayla Prestel (Happy). The jackrabbit Firestone, leader of the Valley and sympathetic to Bud, has visions, like Fiver in Watership Down, and he dreams of a place without humans, spurring him and the banished Bud to set off in search of this potential utopia. As a result, the animals decide to banish Bud. In PackRat, the animals of the Valley blame Bud, the eponymous packrat, for the fire because he collects human "treasures," which is not only unusual but against the laws of the Valley. PackRat cites Watership Down as an inspiration, but in these opening minutes, it is hard to avoid also thinking not only of the animals in Bambi desperately running from a forest set ablaze by a human campfire but also of how much worse human avarice and disregard has made such events in the close to 80 years since the Disney film, as witnessed by the fires in California in recent years and, even more immediately, by the catastrophic, heart-sickening crisis in Australia. Ignited accidentally by a careless rancher, it forces the animals of the Valley to flee before its advancing flames. The inciting incident in Renee Philippi's new puppet-forward play PackRat is a fire. L-R: Alanna Strong (Kitt) Maggie Gayford (Kip) Carlo Adinolfi (Bud) and Kayla Prestel (Happy). Presented by Concrete Temple Theatre at Dixon Place
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