Read the review: http://www.premierguitar.com/articles/24561-wren-and-cuff-elephant-skin-review
Mastodon’s Troy Sanders is considered by many to be one of the more consummate modern-metal bassists. His lines run the gamut from simple to spider-like, and are often delivered in a rumbling, fuzzed-out package courtesy of his well-loved Wren and Cuff Tall Font Russian. A collaboration between Sanders and the SoCal pedal manufacturer made perfect sense, and the result is the Elephant Skin bass fuzz. The concept behind its design was simple: Start with the company’s Tall Font Russian, but offer up more saturation and volume in a footswitchable format.
The beating heart of the Elephant Skin is the same exact circuit as the Tall Font Russian’s—which is the company’s take on the boxier-sounding ’90s Sovtek Big Muff series—and not modified in any way. The pedal houses controls for volume, tone, distortion, and the amount of gain boost (labeled XT). The latter only comes into play when a dedicated footswitch is activated. The boost circuit contains an extra gain stage that’s placed before the fuzz circuit and it can be used by itself for clean boosting or for pushing the gain over the edge when cascaded into the fuzz circuit.
To get a feel for the Elephant Skin, I used a Fender P and a trusty Gallien-Krueger 400RB paired with an Ampeg 8x10. I got started with the pedal’s volume at 11 o’clock, the tone at noon, and the gain at 1 o’clock. Like the stompboxes that inspired it, the Elephant Skin adeptly translated the instrument’s fierce low end with a tight and enormously full delivery that didn’t muddy up with harder fingerpicking.
To continue reading the review, visit: http://www.premierguitar.com/articles/24561-wren-and-cuff-elephant-skin-review