Red Witch Ivy Distortion

The Red Witch Seven Sisters Ivy Distortion is a high-gain distortion pedal, part of Red Witch Pedals' Seven Sisters series. Red Witch describes it as capable of recreating the saturated, amplifier distortion tones of artists such as Slayer and Metallica, and the maker's page calls it simply a "High Gain Distortion"¹. When the Seven Sisters line debuted at NAMM in 2011, MusicRadar introduced Ivy as "A high-gain Metal priestess of the first order"². The pedal is all analog, and it is currently listed as Sold Out on the maker's site¹³.

A mid-centric all-analog distortion

MusicRadar's review places the Seven Sisters among "all-analogue pedals"³. What sets the Ivy's voicing apart, according to Premier Guitar's review, is a mid-focused character: "Ivy's overall character is fairly mid-centric, and you'll hear small cuts in both bass and treble when you engage the effect"⁴. That means the pedal sits in the middle of the frequency range rather than scooping it, which is a different approach from many metal-oriented distortions that cut mids for a scooped sound.

Premier Guitar's reviewer found the pedal flexible in most settings, with a limit at the extremes: "Almost all of her configurations are highly usable, and only those that need really piercing high-end lead or a bloated" low end fall outside what it does well⁴. For a player, that reads as a distortion that covers a wide range of usable gain tones but is not voiced for either glassy treble-heavy leads or oversized low-end rhythm crunch.

The gain knob

The Ivy keeps things simple with two controls, and Red Witch's own descriptions of them are characteristically brief¹:

Premier Guitar's review gives a more practical picture of how the Gain knob behaves across its travel. Around 9 o'clock, the reviewer found it gave guitars "a little more treble bite and clarity" suited to percussive rhythm playing, while pushing it past 12 o'clock produced a glassy lead tone⁴. With only Gain and Volume to set, dialing in a sound is a matter of finding the point on that one knob where the character suits the part.

Trim pot and layout

Unlike some of the other Seven Sisters pedals, the Ivy does not have an internal trim pot for a third adjustment, so everything the player can change is on the outside of the box⁴. The jack sockets are mounted on the top side of the pedal, which matters for pedalboard layout: top-mounted jacks let cables run upward rather than out the back, saving space on tight boards¹.

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