The Skeleton Key from UK-based company Funny Little Boxes aims to unlock that Queens Of The Stone Age guitar tone
This is the first time we’ve taken a look at a pedal from Norwich-based Funny Little Boxes, but it’s not the company’s first pedal. That honour goes to the 1991, acollaboration between the Let’s Play All YouTube channel and Funny Little Boxes, which was designed to be ‘Pearl Jam in a box’. Two years on from that, the same partnership is at it again with anew pedal that aims to give you the sound of another of Seattle’s finest, Queens Of The Stone Age.
The Skeleton Key is an op-amp-based distortion pedal that is described as having “specifically tuned gain stages” that –when used with adown-tuned, humbucker-based guitar –will nail a whole load of QOTSA tones. A quick internet search will tell you that there’s plenty of players out there who’d like to recreate Josh Homme’s guitar tone and that there are many solutions put forward as to how to get it, so this pedal could be the grab ’n’ go answer for those players.
Gain, Volume and Tone knobs work interactively here in a pedal that has a forward midrange. At the minimum Gain setting you can set the Volume fully clockwise for a clean boost with extra body, but that’s not really the point of the pedal –this is about adding in a particular range of distortion and it does that with a real growly presence. It’s eminently suitable for the sort of riffage that QOTSA is known for, particularly if you’re not averse to using lowered tunings such as the Cstandard often favoured by Josh Homme. With the Gain knob at maximum it’s not high-gain territory but more a controlled raunch with a raucous edge to it. This can all be influenced by a Tone knob that runs from a sub
