NRG Effects Purrer review

Insightful parents ensured that Neil R Grimes was destined to have a cool choice of name for an effects pedal company later in life. 

Based in Eastbourne, Neil designs, builds and hand-paints all his pedals and can offer customer customisations. For example, this NRG Purrer starts at £260 but our sample adds internal battery power and external channel changing. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves... 

So, the NRG Purrer is a dual overdrive pedal with an extra footswitch to switch between Orange and Red channels, which have exactly the same sound and gain range but feature their own ‘Purr’ knob to set different amounts of gain/drive. 

There’s one knob for the overall output level, but for the Red channel you also get the clearly-thought-out ‘Leap’ knob that allows extra adjustment and fine tuning of its output level. It’s at unity at around 10 o’clock so there’s plenty of boost available - great if you have both channels with the same amount of drive but want one a little louder. 

Alternatively, if you have the Red channel set for more drive than the Orange, there’s a small amount of leeway to set the Leap knob lower to mitigate for any unwanted volume jump when you kick it in. 

With minimum settings of Purr, the pedal works great as a clean boost with or without tonal shift - overall tonal tweaking being carried out by the ‘Bite’ and ‘Milk’ knobs, which respectively adjust the top end presence and bottom end, also influencing the mids (both turned up full offer a nice scooped vibe). Between the two there’s plenty of very natural tonal variation plus there’s also a ‘Soft’ switch that subtly tames the high-mid range peak that drives the gain, another variation that helps match pedal to pickup types. 

Turning the Purr knob up, the overdrive on offer is of the low-to-medium variety running to a raunchy grind and is nicely transparent with the Bite and Milk knobs set just right. This is the sort of pedal that will organically complement a good amp without altering its character, while also stacking really well with other drive pedals, offering two levels of extra kick.