Digitech Grunge – Teenage Dreams and Distorted Realities

I’ve been on a bit of a nostalgia kick lately with the old Digitech pedals — it all started when I plugged in the Screamin’ Blues. I’ve covered the Bad Monkey before (I was a fan before the wild frenzy our Josh Scott whipped up), but I’ve always had a soft spot for this entire series. They might have been marketed as budget-friendly stompboxes, but the two-band EQ they all share makes them far more useful than a lot of the single-tone-knob pedals they were clearly inspired by.

After revisiting the Screamin’ Blues and then the Hot Head, I realised I was slowly rebuilding the collection I had in my younger years — and honestly, it felt great. Even though I didn’t rate the Hot Head quite as highly as the others, I still found it an improvement over the pedal that clearly inspired it. So, I decided to complete the set and track down the two I’d never properly owned: the Grunge and the Death Metal.

The Hunt for the Forgotten One

Now, I’ve never been a fan of Reverb (the site, not the effect). I know myself too well — I’ve got an addictive personality and a weakness for a bargain — so I stick to eBay. It’s a little more of a free-for-all, but that usually means better deals if you’re patient.

I started my search not long after uploading my last video, with some gentle encouragement from the premiere chat (you lot are a bad influence). Straight away, I noticed something odd: the Death Metal had suddenly become weirdly expensive. £60 and up, routinely. I vaguely remembered Ola Englund doing a video on it, and let’s face it — he probably has about as much sway in the metal community as Josh Scott does in the rest of the pedal world.

The Grunge, though? Totally forgotten. No hype, no inflated prices. Just sitting there, gathering digital dust, waiting for a nostalgic fool like me to come along. I found one boxed, at a good price, and pulled the trigger.

Loud, Grunge, and… Confused

The Grunge follows the same format as the rest of the Digitech budget-yet-refined-classics line — four knobs, solid enclosure, familiar layout. But instead of the usual Level, Gain, Low, and High, we’ve got Loud and Grunge. How very late-’90s.

I couldn’t help but feel a strange sense of déjà vu when I saw those control names. They reminded me of the BB Blaster, one of those cheap, plasticky practice amps that haunted bedrooms everywhere back in the day. The ones with “edgy” control labels like Beef, Tweak, and Enjoy. The controls were names were a perfect metaphor for the amp itself; confusing and difficult to work, with no real payoff. Those amps littered bedrooms across the nation and were often the perfect partner to a not-quite-branded Strat copy. Those amps were probably responsible for putting more people off realising their rock and roll dreams than any other piece of musical equipment out there. Now this reminiscence might seem like an odd tangent, but dear reader let me tell you, this is what we call foreshadowing....

When I Was a Teenage Dirtbag…

I actually remember this pedal vividly from my early gig-going years. There was a local band of Nirvana-wannabes — flannel shirts, unwashed hair in their eyes, the whole lot — and their singer/guitarist had one of these lilac Digitech Grunge boxes strewn haphazardly on the stage in front of him (pedalboards weren't rock and roll, clearly - Kurt didn't have one). Back then, my ear wasn’t exactly refined; louder and angrier was better. I remember seeing him stomp on that thing and feeling like the heavens had opened.

Fast forward a couple of decades, and I plug mine in for the first time…

Well. Let’s just say nostalgia can be a liar.

Tone? What Tone?

I'm not going to sugar coat things here, this pedal sucks. It’s absolutely drenched in compression from the word go, with a wall of noise that only gets worse as you push the gain. The EQ section — normally the saving grace of this series — does its best to help, but there’s only so much it can do.

Pulling the Highs back cuts the clarity completely, leaving you with a nasal, almost transistor-radio tone. Pushing it up doesn't yield harsh, fizzy tones but it doesn't exactly fix it either. The Lows are equally unruly: dial them back, and the sound collapses into thin, cardboard mush; push them up, and you get this overblown thump that sounds like your speakers are about to file for early retirement. It is the first pedal I have demo'd that has actually pushed hard against the limiter I use. I have it in the chain exactly for this reason as not to experience horrible digital distortion when recording, but the bass on this almost managed that even with the limiter on. Yes, the bass control is entirely too much!

The Grunge doesn’t really have sweet spots — it has less awful spots. The other Digitech drives, like the Screamin’ Blues and Bad Monkey, feel responsive and musical. The Grunge feels like the controls are clinging on for dear life, trying (and failing) to rein in chaos.

But… I Don’t Regret It

Here’s the thing, though: I don’t regret picking it up for a second. It might be a sonic disaster, but it’s my sonic disaster. It reminds me of those early years discovering local bands, figuring out tones, and getting properly obsessed with guitar gear for the first time.

It’s not a pedal I’ll be plugging in again any time soon — unless I’m doing a demo on “how not to EQ a distortion pedal” — but it’s found a permanent place in my collection as a little nostalgic relic. A reminder of how far I’ve come since those early days of chasing noise for noise’s sake.

Sometimes a bad pedal can still be a good memory.

Final Thoughts

The Digitech Grunge might have been designed to capture the spirit of the ‘90s — loud, brash, and unapologetically messy — but it ends up more “BB Blaster practice amp” than “Bleach-era Nirvana.”

Still, for those of us who grew up during that era, it’s hard not to feel a bit sentimental about it. It’s a product of its time — and that time just happened to be one of experimentation, distortion, and questionable tone decisions.

If you find one cheap and you’re feeling nostalgic, go for it. Just don’t expect to be blown away. Unless, of course, you accidentally leave the Lows turned up too high.