Favorite overdrive pedals

[mrpinter]

These three are my current favorite OD pedals (limiting this post to overdrives, not fuzz or distortions, which are different effects):

1. Earthquaker Devices Speaker Cranker. If you want just a simple effect to put some hair on your playing without fussing with a lot of knobs, and without coloring your tone excessively - this is your pedal. It has ONE control, a knob simply called MORE - the gain control. It isn't "transparent", but has a very natural tube saturation type of sound to it. One thing they've done I had an issue with however is to give the pedal a volume boost that increases with higher gain settings. Sometimes I want this, but sometimes don't want any extra boost if I just intend to lay back in the mix. So I had a simple master volume pot installed inside the pedal by an amp tech who does work for me occasionally. Here are pics of the pedal and the mod:

and a video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNK9UsfIAv8

2. Subdecay Super Nova Drive. A sleeper pedal you don't hear much about on the boards and there aren't many decent YouTube demos of it. It's been out for quite a while, and is very useful with it's three band EQ and it's underlying great tone and wide range from just a little drive to almost fuzz levels.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX8AmQzjmrg

3. Earthquaker Devices Chrysalis. A discontinued pedal you can still find new in at least one online effects retailer I know of, this pedal has it's own thing going on. While perhaps similar to a Tube Screamer type box, it's voicing is a bit different - it was designed to sound like 70s rock guitars as recorded on vinyl records. Strange as this may sound, it is an accurate enough description of it's sound. This thing CUTS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubkAsmueh9Y

 

[sixstringsamurai]

:headbang1:
and I LOVE the Vol mod. I need to do that to mine.
What resistance is the one in yours?

 

[mrpinter]

What resistance is the one in yours?

I have no idea, the amp tech made all those decisions.

 

[Surf n Music]

Well I got this guy. I am liking it. It seems like with the drive turned way down and the 100hz about 10 oclock and mids backed off I got a t-s9 sound. I am still experimenting but by turning the drive up and things break up a bit.  I don't have a lot to compare it to but it is fun to play with.

 

[SustainerPlayer]

Well. I just started selling amps and pedals and going back to some rack/digital setups again.

But the best overdrive amongst the ones I've been through I found to be the very cheap Digitech Bad Monkey:

Sounded really good through an AC15 just on the verge of breaking up.

 

[KaiserSoze]

Joyo Ultimate Drive is the only one I've kept and consistently use.  I really like the sounds and the versatility. It convinced me that I don't have to spend huge bank to get a good overdrive.

That said, I'm sure I'll buy others to try….the joy is in the journey. 

 

[aarontunes]

Well. I just started selling amps and pedals and going back to some rack/digital setups again.

But the best overdrive amongst the ones I've been through I found to be the very cheap Digitech Bad Monkey:

Sounded really good through an AC15 just on the verge of breaking up.

Yup. I've tried about a kajillion OD pedals, including all the expensive boutiques.

The Bad Monkey is my favorite of all of them. I've done hundreds of gigs with it and it always sounds great and has never so much as hiccuped. Probably the best $40 bucks I've ever spent on gear.

 

[Jet-Jaguar]

I'm always a little bit reluctant to post in these threads, since I'm not that seasoned of a player (never played live or in a band, just learning still.) But here are the ones that I've owned and liked:

Earthquaker Devices Mantra Limited edition: Made a post about this the other week.  Really nice pedal, very versatile, makes me happy when I come back to it. I think they should make all the Mantra pedals like the limited edition.

Moog MF drive: I think it's not so much a drive as a fuzz, but you can set the gain down, and it has a nice overdrive sound to it.

Catalinbread Naja: This is more of a clean boost. It's supposed to be like a Dallas Rangemaster, only with more tone control.  I like it. Tried it with the Fender Mustang set to emulate a Vox amp, and got into Brian Mays territory. I think it's a little over-priced, but it sounds good.

Seymour Duncan Twin Tube Classic:  It has actual tubes. When I had my cheap solid state amp, it made that amp sound really, really good. Now that I have an actual tube amp, I don't use it because it sounds kinda "fizzy" in front of that amp. I also tried it in front of a mustang modeling amp, and it wasn't so great there, either. But it's really great for fixing a sterile-sounding amp, and I got it as a gift anyway, so I'm keeping it in case I'm ever in that situation again.

Mooer Rumble Drive: Fun, very small, liked the sound when I dialed it in. It billed some places as "low-gain" but not it's not really-low-gain, it's more medium gain. 

But I have one word of advice should you ever get one of these small Mooer, Donner, eno, etc. pedals: get a white Sharpie paint pen, and fill the notches on the knobs with white. It's not like you're ruining an expensive pedal, and your eyes will thank you. Those tiny knobs are hard to read.

And this is a little off the subject, but I think I'm over hard-to-read, metallic knobs. I want easy to read knobs, and if they're plastic, I don't really care.  I'm not anti-plastic.

Joyo Ultimate Drive is the only one I've kept and consistently use.  I really like the sounds and the versatility. It convinced me that I don't have to spend huge bank to get a good overdrive.

I think the Joyo and Mooer pedals are changing a lot of people's opinions.  The "you get what you pay for" attitude really doesn't match up with what we're hearing.

But the market is really crazy: I'm seeing the boutique makers come out with $160-200 rat clones. An actual Rat pedal made by pro-co is only $70.  People are buying the Mooer version ($88) because it actually sounds better, at least in the Youtube videos I've seen.

The problem right now is that some of the cheap pedals are great, and some aren't so great; or at least this is what I get from the forums I've read and the videos I've listened to.  I have a Joyo California, and I like it with the gain down for Blue-album Weezer tone.  But it's not true-bypass (not that I can really hear a difference when it's off.) I got a used Hotone pedal off ebay (~ $30) and sounded fizzy.

 

[KaiserSoze]

Another huge value I'm convinced is a great pedal is the EH Soul Food.  It sounds pretty cool on its own and I was happy with paying the $60 for it but it really shines in a mix.  I'm not overly technical but the frequencies that thing puts out with the drive at about 3 o'clock will cut through a mix nicely.
Thats not to say the lower drive settings aren't useful though.  As a boost it really makes single coil tones fat and juicy. I'm really please with that one and its one of those "almost always on" pedals on my board.

 

[TonyFlyingSquirrel]

I may be one of the few people on the planet that doesn't get all gooey about Tube Screamers.  I only use it with Tweed presets.
Other than that, I used to have and loved the old DOD FX56 American Metal pedal as it was the most natural sounding of high gain pedals of its day back in the late 80's/early 90's.

I like the Boss Blues Driver, as it is also very natural sounding, but it just doesn't have enough gain for my taste.

I thing the Bogner offerings are great, the Bogner Ecstasy Blue & Red pedals, as well as the Uberschaal.

Those are about the only ones that really shuck my corn.  Haven't ventured out to try much else.

 

[bagman67]

I had the American Metal pedal, too, when I was a callow youth, and I liked it a lot.  I frankly didn't care for its distortion, but I dialed the gain way down and used it as a (comparatively) clean boost to overdrive the Marshall preamp I was playing through at the time, and that did very interesting things indeed.


Nowadays I pretty much rely solely on amp gain.

 

[DavyDave53]

My favorite OD pedal.  Bar none.

 

[Jet-Jaguar]

My favorite OD pedal.  Bar none.

LOL!  I almost bought one on Ebay just because of the story behind it.  (For those that don't know, Freekish Blue was re-painting Joyo pedals and selling them as "handmade Pedals" for $160, although some people said that the pedals are ever so slightly different in sound.  The company never recovered from the scandal.)

 

[DarkPenguin]

Best bang for the buck is the EH Soul Food.  I also like my Joyo Sweet Baby Overdrive.  The most versatile pedal I have is the super badass distortion.  Can dial in a lot of sounds with that one.

 

[KaiserSoze]

My favorite OD pedal.  Bar none.

LOL!  I almost bought one on Ebay just because of the story behind it.  (For those that don't know, Freekish Blue was re-painting Joyo pedals and selling them as "handmade Pedals" for $160, although some people said that the pedals are ever so slightly different in sound.  The company never recovered from the scandal.)

I remember that too.  Theres very little out there that is not at least "inspired by" if not right out copied, but my Joyo Ultimate Drive is about the best $30 I ever spent.  It was so close to my OCD that it didn't matter at all in a band mix.  Great pedal.

 

[DustyCat]

For not owning a 2205 or an EVH III, I like the Blackstone Mosfet overdrive.
Ultra Compact.  :icon_thumright: In front of my amp I can get those bell-like chiming pinch harmonics.

Also I noticed some amps having a certain "Clenching stomach compression" when I use the amp's gain, but with this pedal in front of my amp, the overdrive is much more "airy."
Only downside is the price, and the lack of tone controls between the 2 channels (its got a scooped mid function, but I love mids).

 

[alterbridgefan]

Mmm...

Love these. They're like tube screamers on steroids.

 

[Jet-Jaguar]

So, recently, I was able to get a Mad Professor Royal Blue overdrive for 20% off.  I think I mentioned before that I already had a Sweet Honey overdrive.

Well, the Royal blue is really nice, but it's a lot like the SHO.  I've been a/b'ing them, and there's wider equalization settings with the RBO, but the SHO kinda, sorta, bites more.  There's really no reason to buy both. Now I have to decide which one to keep, and which one to sell, which is hard to decide because they're so similar.

 

[Cagey]

I'm still in search of a "Favorite Overdrive Pedal", To me, they all sound fake. They're all a valiant effort to make an amp sound as if you've got an overly-hot guitar or an amp turned up to the point of distortion, but they generally fail in their mission. It's sorta like wearing a toupee. You think you're fooling people, but they all know better.

 

[Jumble Jumble]

An overdrive pedal can pretty easily just boost the output of your guitar so that it overdrives the amp a bit more. I think that's what they probably started off as. I don't ever use overdrives for full on distortion, but I do sometimes use them to add a bit of crunch or "graininess" into the sound, and I think they do that well.

One thing an overdrive pedal is really great for, is driving an already-crunchy amp into distortion. That's an awesome sound. Crunch up a Marshall and put a Tube Screamer in front of it (or, even better, the new Duncan 805 pedal), and that's an awesome sound right there.

Full-on distortion pedals are a different thing again. The distortion that you get from a Boss Metal Zone, for example, has nothing to do with the distortion you get from an amp - it's just a different sound altogether (great for 80s rock, not really so great for metal). And the same goes for Fuzz too, of course.