Review: Mountainking Electronics Megalith

The Megalith is a destructive beast of a fuzz. It turns your guitar's sound into a hulking behemoth bent on destruction. It provides tons of saturated gain with the boost circuit as well as tons of low end and plenty of tone shaping capabilities. Read on to find out more about this crushing high gain fuzz.


Hardware
The Megalith is very minimalist aesthetically but built like a tank and looks like one in it's fairly large enclosure. It has input and output volume controls, the input control can increase or decrease the saturation of fuzz and the output controls volume. There's also a boost circuit for use as a lead boost or just to keep on all the time for added saturation and low end. The tone controls are a bit different from your typical dirt device. Slope acts kind of like a tone control, when turned clockwise it boosts the highs and boosts the lows when turned counterclockwise. To me it didn't sound like a drastic difference where the knob was which was a good thing, it just provided a very tuning to your sound. the notch controls the mids in your sound and the notch selector changes the cut off point of the notch control. With the mids fully boosted it doesn't make much of a difference but with the mids cut it can take you from a slight scoop to super scooped. The nine volt power input and input and output jacks are top mounted, great for saving space when you have a larger pedal. This thing felt very well built and has plenty of controls for tweaking your tone.


The Sounds
If you love a dark, bassy and saturated doom tone you should probably stop reading and shoot Mountainking an email because this is your kind of fuzz. It has tons of gain and low end on tap but still retains some cut and top end aggression. The Megalith really sets itself apart from other fuzzes, it has a very unique note decay and fuzzy overtones. It has some top end bite but overall it is very round and synth-like, not as natural sounding as more traditional fuzzes. I really can't aptly describe it, but it's something I've never heard from any other fuzz. Now if you'd like to dial back the saturation and tame the beast for something more responsive to your guitars' volume control and pick attack, you just roll back the input volume control and disengage the 'more heavy' switch. This will lower the gain and tighten up the low end. Sometimes the bass the Megalith puts out is massive without being boomy or too woofy. One just needs to find the sweet spot on the input control as well as the notch and slope controls. This thing can dial in almost any thick saturated fuzz/distortion. I prefer a dark saturated fuzz tone for doom sounds and the Megalith definitely fit the bill, have a listen.


MegalithLead by Mike Fetting


MegalithDoom by Mike Fetting


Final Verdict
The Megalith is a high gain beast with plenty of tonal options and it's built like a tank. I have yet to hear a fuzz that sounds quite like it. If you're looking for a high gain monster and price isn't a problem, this is it right here.