Effectrode has long been known for its tube-driven effects such as the Tube Vibe. But they’ve just released a new overdrive pedal with three tubes that give you up to six gain stages of drive! OMG! Talk about saturation city! Note that this pedal ain’t cheap at $399, but if it delivers on what appears to be very promising features, I might be hard-pressed not to take a serious look at this pedal. It’ll be interesting what people say about this pedal.
Here’s the description of from the Effectrode site:
The Tube Drive, pure class-A tube overdrive pedal featuring three triode vacuum tubes for a total of six gain stages. The drive knob simultaneously controls the gain of all cascaded stages so that they progressively clip allowing the Tube Drive to respond empathically to your pick attack with a graceful breakup characteristic. At lower gain settings this pedal excels at producing authentic blues and mild break-up to add some “dirt” to playing whilst always sounding smooth and musical. Pushing the drive a little higher produces the classic 70’s overdriven tube amp tone and at even higher gains the sound becomes rich in harmonic content without masking the the natural sound of your guitar and amplifier. The Tube Drive allows you to effortlessly climb the gain curve to create sustaining, super-saturated lead tones, inspire you and power your solos beyond escape velocity, through the stratocastersphere soaring into high energy orbit!
Features
- All Tube gain circuitry: 100% analog, class-A, clipping circuitry based on three cascaded tubes. No silicon in the signal path – guaranteed. This topology gives the Tube Drive fine control over a wide range of gain characteristics from mild breakup to creamy saturation.
- Bax-Stack “active” tube tone control: The Tube Drive is the only overdrive with an active tube tone control. The Bax-Stack is a real treble boost (and cut) circuit with zero insertion loss, unlike passive tone stacks which can only remove frequency content (“tone-sucking”). The tone range is optimized to work over important frequencies essential for mellow jazz tones to some serious crunch.
- Low-end coutour switch: Active low boost for a warmer, richer sound. Especially useful with single coil pickups to thicken the sound or when playing at low volumes to compensate for loudness.
- Orange L.E.D.: Indicates when pedal is engaged.
Very cool! But even cooler are the sound samples. Check ’em out!!!
335 solo
Strat Solo
YYZ solo
Crunch
Saturation
Mild Breakup
Strat Drive
Crunch Too!
Red Barchetta
Sustain
Description and sound clips courtesy of Effectrode Pedals.
Guitar Gear 
Cool now there is a pedal that can dial in the “RUSH” tones! The price ain’t bad considering the pedal has 3 preamp tubes, which is equal to the preamp section of a typical tube amp. Heck, there are a lot of overdrive boutique pedals out there with solid state components that are in this price range.
I agree wholeheartedly with 56LP. Unfortunately, Effectrode has to spell it out: “all tube mean NO transistors, NO clipping diodes, NO op-amps, NO ICs, NO SOLID STATE DEVICES IN THE AUDIO/SIGNAL PATH AT ALL”, because if they don’t say exactly those words, it ALWAYS means there is some kind of solid state gain stage sonewhere between the input and the output. Even the SD Twin Tube Blue advertises (practically in the same sentence) “100% vacuum tube signal path” and “discreet high voltage solid state input gain stage for maximum gain and blah blah blah”. These are contradictory statements, and the second makes the first a lie. Thanks Effectrode for being real and honest, now I have a pedal that I can buy that won’t suck the tubular purity and warmth right out of my signal before it even hits my amp!