KMA Audio Machines Wurm 2

With KMA Audio Machines WURM Distortion pedal, KMA brought you a highly regarded, yet unabashed sonic love letter to the legendary filthy ‘doom and gloom’ distortion sound of the original Boss HM2 MIJ pedal, taking it much further and pushing the envelope of how destructive it could be.

Adorned in an iconic black and orange colour-scheme reminiscent of its inspiration, WURM 2 takes the essential ingredients of KMA’s now classic pedal, adding the ability to switch between EQ settings right on the front of the pedal. In addition, KMA squeezed it into a smaller and more pedal board friendly enclosure with top mounted jacks, improved the electronics and enhanced it with relay-based silent switching, all helping to make WURM 2 a more flexible metal-distortion pedal than ever before.

Calling a pedal legendary or a cult classic is often stretching the truth, but when it comes to the Boss HM-2 MIJ it’s absolutely on the money. From its beyond brutal and grinding distortion tones, bands like Dismember and Entombed birthed Swedish chainsaw metal. While WURM 2 absolutely nails that death-metal sound, its thick walls of gain and sustain is not all about that genre – the pedal is also adept for so many other styles, from Shoegaze to Prog Rock. To give you an idea, famous players like David Gilmour, Prince, Johnny Marr, Belinda Butcher, Lee Ranaldo, Daron Malakian and more have all made their mark with this style of distortion.

KMA kept the iconic active HM-2 dual-band EQ section, but added two more bands, giving a much wider range of tones to tailor your evil and gritty distortion sound. On top of that, each band has an internal trim-pot to change the centre frequency and fine-tune your tone further if the need arises.

For the WURM pedal, KMA developed their own EQ stack and added an internal EQ STYLE switch to help you carve out additional tonal variations. In WURM 2, this is now on the front of the pedal to make it easier to access and for even more tonal options on-the-fly. Selecting HM-II mode will get you that classic ‘chainsaw’ High-Mids character. However, in KMA mode the EQ is a little more tonally balanced, less peaky and a bit wider in response. If balanced and less peaky sounds too boring for you, select BOTH to fatten and double up the tone stacking, letting you ramp up the LOWS and the H-MIDS and rip that Swedish forest completely to shreds!

However, with all of this extra tone shaping, the pedal can sometimes begin to feedback at extreme settings. So, if this proves too much and to help tame that high-frequency content, KMA added a new internal control to smoothen things out. By flipping the dip-switch to activate the input filter, this will help to tame the high frequencies when absolutely everything is maxed out.