The Reagun Distortion is a compact distortion pedal from Japan, made by Shiino Vesta Fire Corporation (SVFC), the company that later became Vestax. It belongs to the family of distortion pedals from the early to mid eighties, and the same unit was sold under three brand names: Vesta Fire, Nadine's and Reagun1.
What it does
The circuit was traced by Manfred, who posted his results on the freestompboxes.org forum, and the Guitar FX Layouts blog published a stripboard layout based on that trace in December 2022. The analysis describes the topology as similar to an OD250 style overdrive, but with a Big Muff style tone stack and an inverting amplifier as a recovery stage. In other words, it sits between the overdrive and fuzz families: an overdrive-style gain stage feeding a tone control borrowed from the Big Muff approach, with a recovery stage to bring the level back up1.
"This one reminds me of OD250 with BMP style tone stack and a decent inverting amplifier as a recovery stage."
Availability of recordings
No sound demos of the Reagun Distortion were found by the Guitar FX Layouts author at the time of writing, so published recordings of the pedal are scarce. Players researching what it sounds like have little to go on beyond the traced circuit itself1.
Sources (1)
- Guitar FX Layouts: Vesta Fire / Reagun / Nadine's Distortion, Guitar FX Layouts (tagboardeffects.blogspot.com), 2022-12-20