Ola Englund

Ola Englund is a Swedish guitar virtuoso, YouTuber and record producer, and in the metal gear world he is known by a single title: the king of chug¹. Guitar World credits him with having "mastered the art of extracting mind-blowing modern metal tones from just about any gear that comes his way," and with using that knowledge to handcraft his own line of guitars and effects pedals under the Solar brand¹. He is also the founder of Solar Guitars, the maker of the Chug pedal, and he has centerd an entire YouTube show around one question about gear: will it chug²³.

The king of chug: the sound he is known for

The word chug follows Englund everywhere, and it is his own. Of the Solar Chug high gain preamp pedal he said:

The signature Solar Guitars Ola Englund Chug high gain preamp pedal carries an impressive 10 controls, including a noise gate, arranged across four dual-concentric pots⁴. Guitar Pedal X lists it at $199 alongside other compact high-gain metal distortions, where it sits next to the Wampler Dracarys, described there as an "Ola Englund Homage Chug Style Distortion," also at $199⁸. MusicRadar describes Wampler's distortion pedals as inspired by "YouTube's, and the Haunted's, metal guitar tone guru Ola Englund"².

The Chug line has since grown into a family of pedals:

Guitar Pedal X notes an interesting difference between the two distortion pedals: the original Chug with its 10 controls is more "on-rails," giving infinite variations on the core Ola chug sound, while on the Chug Lite you can scoop the mids for vintage low-end punch, which the original does not allow⁵. On the Chug Capo, Englund is very happy with how fast the pedal turns on and off, and that it does so without any weird glitches⁶. He calls it the fastest and most transparent-sounding pitch shifter to date, especially for tight rhythm playing, chords and pinch harmonics, which, he adds, "are usually the first things to expose weaknesses in pitch shifters"⁹.

Gear he has demoed and endorsed

Englund's reach goes well beyond his own brand, largely through his YouTube channel, where makers send him gear to demo.

• Quad Cortex mini: Guitar World's review of the Neural DSP Quad Cortex mini notes that the YouTuber used his as a trampoline to test durability claims, and the reviewer found the unit "very robust indeed"¹⁰.
• Headrush Tone3000: He uploaded a capture of his Randall Satan amplifier to the Tone3000 and demoed it in a video about the launch of the Tone3000 plugin¹¹.
• Fortin Meshuggah Distortion: He made a demo of the Meshuggah Distortion pedal, which Guitar Pedal X describes as hitting hard, super saturated and tight, for a palm-muted djent sound¹².

He is also on the Horizon Devices artists page, where he says of the Precision Drive:

For players chasing the sound itself, the practical entry points are his own distortion and preamp pedals in the Chug family, or the Wampler Dracarys built around his tone¹⁴. The Chug Capo covers pitch shifting for rhythm work⁶, and the Chug Parametric EQ with Boost is aimed at tuning up a high-gain rig⁷.

Questions