RAT

The first RATs weren’t really products. A dozen or so were built to order in 1977 or 1978, in Bud Boxes, the plain metal enclosures any electronics supplier kept on the shelf. ProCo’s owner, Charlie Wicks, liked the thing enough to make it real, and by 1979 it was in the catalog. You’ll hear 1978 for the RAT, too. The dates don’t agree, and nobody’s settling it now.

The production version was the “Big Box” RAT: a big black wraparound enclosure with white lettering, about as subtle as the name. A bass version, the Juggernaut, came out the same year.

Vernon Reid played a Big Box, and he remembers what it did to people:

People were freaking out. Hard-rock dudes, metal dudes, funk dudes—everybody. It was insane.

In 1981 ProCo reversed the Tone knob and renamed it Filter. Turn it clockwise and the sound gets darker, the opposite of most pedals. It still catches people out.

Here’s what’s going on in there. An op-amp, originally a chip called the LM308, turns the signal up so hard it starts distorting on its own. Then two silicon diodes to ground chop the tops off. The Filter comes after all that, a low-pass that decides how much top end gets through. The LM308 was a slow chip, and that slowness is part of why a RAT’s top end doesn’t fizz the way harsher distortions do. It trims a little bass and leaves the midrange up front.

Three knobs, Distortion, Filter, Volume, and a lot of road between them. Keep the Distortion low and it’s an overdrive; John Scofield used it that way. Past about two-thirds it gets thick and grungy. All the way up it’s nearly a fuzz.

By 1984 Boss, MXR, and DOD were all selling compact pedals, so the RAT shrank to keep up: first the “White Face,” then the “Black Face” in 1986. The RAT2 came in 1988, with an on/off LED and labels that glow in the dark, and it’s the one still in production. The LM308 went obsolete along the way, and by 1996 something else was in its socket.

The family grew. A ProCo employee, Gerry “Grape” Carpenter, built the Turbo RAT in 1989, with red LEDs as its clipping diodes. Later came the Deucetone, the You Dirty RAT with germanium diodes, and the FATRAT, plus reissues from 1991 on.

All that range shows up in who plugged one in. Jeff Beck and Nuno Bettencourt, sure. But also the jazz guys: Scofield, Bill Frisell, Ben Monder, Kurt Rosenwinkel. Nels Cline. David Gilmour had one in his 1994 rig. A distortion box that a jazz guitarist and a metal guitarist both want on the floor is a rare thing.

1991. Nirvana are making Nevermind with Butch Vig, and Kurt Cobain has a RAT.

Plugging a distortion pedal straight into a mixing console, with no amp and no speaker, is usually how you get a thin, buzzing mess. It’s one of the first things you learn not to do. Vig did it anyway, on purpose, and he remembers it plainly:

Kurt had a Rat distortion pedal that he used on a couple of songs, and on a track like ‘Breed’ we just DI’d the Rat, we didn’t go to an amp. We split the signal and we ran it to an amp, and we also took the DI and ran it right into the board so that it had much more of a fuzzy white-noise kind of sound to it.

The two songs were “Breed” and “Territorial Pissings,” the most frantic things on the record.

Put on “Breed” and listen past the amp, to the grain riding on top like static on a loud radio. That’s the half of the signal that never went near a speaker cabinet. Somebody heard a mistake, liked it, and left it on the record.