Pete Cornish Deluxe SS-2

The Pete Cornish Deluxe SS-2 is an overdrive and distortion effect pedal made by the Pete Cornish Partnership, the British company that builds its pedals by hand in small numbers. The SS-2 design is described by Pete Cornish as "SOFT SUSTAIN WITH PASSIVE TOP CUT", a gain pedal aimed at sustaining, singing lead tones rather than hard-edged distortion¹². The maker has described the SS-2 circuit as "Totally different from any overdrive/distortion effect that has ever been previously available"³.

What it does

The SS-2 sits in the gain pedal family, alongside Pete Cornish designs such as the Pete Cornish Deluxe P-2 and the Pete Cornish Deluxe G-2, and in the wider world of overdrive pedals and distortion pedals. What sets the SS-2 approach apart, according to the maker, is the input stage: the pedal presents a fixed high impedance load to the guitar, which "allows the pickups to operate at their optimum, even when several" effects follow it in the chain⁴. In practice, that means the SS-2 is designed to be placed early on a pedalboard, where it also acts as a buffer for everything after it.

That buffering is a recurring theme in Pete Cornish's designs. The Deluxe SS-2 includes an "RFI rejecting input and bypass buffer"¹, meaning the signal passing through the pedal is buffered rather than left to run through long cable runs unaided. Players who use long cable runs or several true-bypass pedals in a row often add a buffer pedal for exactly this reason; the SS-2 builds one into the gain circuit.

Build and hardware

Pete Cornish pedals are built for stage use, and the Deluxe SS-2 follows the house pattern¹:

• Rugged die-cast box enclosure with lined control knobs
• Heavy duty custom made all-metal footswitch with a large cap and protection ring
• Hi-Brite LED for status indication
• RFI rejecting input and bypass buffer

The SS-2 family

The SS-2 circuit appears in more than one form from the maker. Alongside the Deluxe SS-2, Pete Cornish has offered the SS-2 as a standalone design and in a Blended version, where the SS-2 sound is set up during calibration: the maker's setup instructions for the blended version say to "engage SS-2 and set Sustain, Tone to taste"⁵. The SS-2 design is also part of the maker's battery-free approach to pedal building, in which pedals are run from external power rather than internal batteries².

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