Hear & Play Sonicake's Rude Mouse and Cowboy Distortion with NAM

After finding the brand Sonicake through their support for Neural Amp Modeler (NAM) in the Pocket Master (reviewed here) and other affordable modelers, I was naturally intrigued by their line of mini pedals. I love a good value, but there are often reasons to be skeptical of value hardware, like guitar pedals. You get what you pay for right?

Well, I had to find out. I bought a Rude Mouse (Rat style distortion) and later a Cowboy Distortion (Dimebag-inspired distortion). Since I've integrated NAM into my site, you can try some digital models of these pedals right here! While it won't be 100% the same as the physical pedal (one of variable is how hot the capture signal is), I hope this can be useful to anyone considering these pedals. Demo videos are great, but I think this medium can give you an idea of how these pedals will react to your playing and pickups. There are also pre-recorded DIs to listen to if you don't have a guitar and interface handy. In addition to my captures of the Rude Mouse and Cowboy distortions, I will point out some models captured and uploaded by others in the TONE3000 community, including a "Klone." Let's look at the pedals!

(You can try the pedals with an IR here on my site, but you might also want to download them and try them in a DAW in front of your favorite amp sim)

Rude Mouse

Obviously, the Rude Mouse is inspired by the Rat pedal with distortion, volume, and filter knobs. It also has a switch that enables a brighter, louder "Hot" mode (which I didn't capture since the "louder" part wouldn't translate to a nam capture).

I've never had the pleasure of owning a real Rat pedal, so I can't directly compare this to Pro Co's pedal. What I can say is that this is a very fun and versatile pedal. There's useful tones all across the settings from OD to a classic bite to Fuzz-ish tones.

Although I wouldn't buy this to serve as a primary "metal distortion," using it with low-gain OD/boost settings in front of my high-gain amp gave my palm muting a pleasing extra bite (think more like an SD-1 than Tube Screamer).

For my own board and rig, this pedal is a good fit; my Marshall DSL5CR's distortion serves me well for a fairly wide variety of metal and rock tones, but the Rude Mouse opens up various tones with more bite and "fuzz" to them (depending on settings).

I created playable models with NAM of this pedal in "bite" and "overdrive" settings for you to try out. You can also see more details about the capture pack on TONE3000 too.

Check out the Rude Mouse on Sonicake's store (earns commission)

Cowboy Distortion

This metal distortion surprised me. It's marketed as being inspired by Pantera/Dimebag tones (which I've held in fairly high regard since childhood), but nobody really expects to plug in a pedal and sound like Dimebag Darrell, right?

To me, this is a fairly solid metal distortion. There are two distortion modes that are indicated by LED color and toggled by holding the footswitch down. The red mode cuts the mid knob out entirely and adds extra grit and volume.

This pedal has a 9 to 18 volt boost circuit for headroom, which I like as well.

I created a couple of NAM models of this pedal on green mode and one at red mode to show the difference. You can also see more details about the capture pack on TONE3000.

A lot of Dimebag Darrell's tone came from techniques that you aren't going to get from a pedal, to be clear. But I found this pedal enjoyable to play.

Check out the Cowboy on Sonicake's store (earns commission)

NAM Models of Sonicake pedals by other creators on T3K

Of course, you might be interested in Sonicake's lineup of mini pedals beyond what I have been able to capture and share here. Luckily, others in the TONE3000's community have been sharing models too. Here are some you can check out:

• Shark- captured by mattiamariodistefano: Distorted Marshall-inspired tones from 3 different eras

• Trio Rider- captured by kwall71: Klon style circuit with 3 modes

I'm sure more captures will be added over time too, so I will try to update this if I come across any that should be included. Also keep in mind that not all types of effects can be modeled with NAM currently (time-based effects don't work).

Wrapping up

My expectations weren't super high for these pedals, but I have enjoyed them both so far. I hope the simulations provided alongside this article have been useful in deciding if these pedals might be for you. Or maybe just enjoyable to try for their own sake. And while NAM is known for its accuracy, buying the physical pedal of either of these lets you explore various tones outside what I captured.

I've been trying to save money lately as I prepare to move to a new city (yay!), so these pedals were a nice treat for myself at the price range without spending hundreds of dollars. Overall, I think the value for my money was solid, especially since both pedals have multiple different distortion voicings, but we will have to see how well they hold up over time.

You can check out the rest of the mini stompbox collection from Sonicake (earns commission) if you are interested in seeing what else they offer.

Thanks for reading!