The Dinosaural name makes a welcome return with all your boost and drive options in a single pedal
DINOSAURAL COGMEISTER £299
What You Need To Know
Dinosaural? Who are they?
Well, if you haven’t heard of Dinosaural you will certainly have heard of Lovetone and ThorpyFX.
Dan Coggins was the designer of the much-missed Lovetone pedals and more recently has been designing pedals for ThorpyFX, including the ER-2 reviewed elsewhere in this issue. Dinosaural is Dan’s own brand.
What’s the Cogmeister?
Dan describes it as “a trio of compatible booster effects designed for the electric guitar”.
So, it’s just like stacking boost and drive pedals together?
Yes, but all in one box with a drive circuit that’s bookended with an input treble booster and an output midrange booster.
When it comes to choosing boost and drive pedals to work together in a signal chain, there are an awful lot of options out there and it can be a bit hit and miss putting some favourite individual pedals together on a ’board to see what works best. Take the case of using three pedals to build up your gain staging – perhaps for clean boost, crunch and lead, or maybe loud, louder and loudest. If that’s your game, the Cogmeister may just provide everything you need in one place; it’s a three-in-one gain pedal with individually footswitchable Push, Drive and Solo sections designed to perfectly complement each other.
The Cogmeister is the brainchild of Dan Coggins, the designer behind the Lovetone pedals that first started appearing in the 1990s and are now sought-after high-ticket collector’s items. Dan founded Dinosaural in 2002, producing the Tube Bender, but took a break from pedal building in 2008, starting up again in 2012 with the likes of the OTC-201 Opti Compressor and OPA-101 Overdriven Pre-Amp.
Around that time Dan met Adrian Thorpe, who was thinking of starting the ThorpyFX brand, and got involved with the project, eventually starting full-time work with Thorpy in 2020. That year was when Dan first put together a prototype of the Cogmeister and used it at gigs, making tweaks along the way before finally getting to the production version we have here. Initial runs were handmade by Dan on his kitchen table, but it was hard to keep up with demand. However, the Thorpy connection has proved very useful in the Cogmeister story as the pedals are now being made on a sub-contract basis by Thorpy and should be readily available – all are still individually tested by Dan who procures the parts for them.
