The Stab Zone….. How did it happen?

We have been a long time fan of the band Mogwai. I had heard many times that they used a Danelectro Fab Tone distortion to achieve their wall of sound (I don’t know how true this is…). I noticed a Fab Tone show up on market place and had to purchase it.

There are now seven Fab Tone pedals in the collection, I’m a little obsessed. They range from very beaten up, to as new in box.

After I made modifications to  a Fab Tone, I decided it would be a great idea to make modifications to make it a part of the Kink range.

The first change I made to the original were to the clipping diodes. The Fab Tone has Symmetrical clipping, but I really like Asymmetrical clipping. I then made changes to the frequencies that were being boosted. I found that a boost at 120Hz and 3kHz gave the low and upper mid frequencies we wanted. The standard tone stack was also modified slightly.

How did the name come about?

Well, most of you would have picked up that Stab Zone sounds somewhat like Fab Tone, but Stab Zone was not the first idea we had. The original idea was going to be called to Scab Thrown, with the idea of some sort of zombie king sitting on a thrown. That idea was short lived though. Stab Zone was the next idea that came to mind.

We have two primary artists we use for our artwork. Pascal D’bras & All Things Rotten. In this case we believed ATR would be the best option for a horror themed piece of art. Below you can see the progress of the artwork.