Guitar Gear

Several years ago, I wrote an article entitled, “Are New Overdrives Irrelvant?” It was a blog entry I wrote during the heyday of this blog where I was evaluating gear left and right; especially overdrive pedals. I answered my own question with a resounding “No” because of all the different overdrive sounds available.

Think about it. You have all sorts of overdrive sounds to choose from: Op Amp, Diode, Tube, Analog Tape, MOSFET, JFET, Germanium and Silicon Transistors, not to mention profiled and modeled overdrive sounds, just to name a few. They all make different sounds. And luckily for us, there’s an overdrive sound or many overdrive sounds that will be pleasing to us.

And it’s why I’ll never tire of overdrives. For instance, this afternoon, I watched a couple of demos of the Strymon Iridium and Deco pedals. The Iridium is a modeler/IR pedal (it sounds freakishly good, by the way), while the Deco is like a dual analog tape machine that provides saturation/overdrive on one side with tape delay on the other, then uses blend and wobble knobs to adjust the mix and interaction between the two sides. That tape saturation is freakin’ awesome!

However, for a while there, about 10-15 years ago, during the heyday of boutique everything, there were lots of copycats. I couldn’t believe how many Tube Screamer knock-offs that were being released to the market with fancy packaging and cool graphics, but inside were nothing more than TS circuits. But that said, there were lots of very very cool gems out there like the Geek Driver based on the ColorSound Overdrive. Totally different approach. Even the introduction of the TC Electronic Mojo Mojo Overdrive was totally cool.

And here’s the conundrum I face with respect to all the great digital amps coming to market: I love my overdrive pedals! For instance, as much as I’ve loved both BOSS Katana amps I’ve had, I have to admit that though the sound quality of the drive models in the amps are pretty good, I’ve never been a fan of BOSS drive pedal sounds.

I love the gain sounds these produce, but something about the drive pedal sounds whether in software or hardware form has always bugged me. So I put a drive pedal in front of either amp or, in the case of the Artist, I plug my drive pedals into the effects loop as I can place the loop immediately after the input (pretty cool).

The point here is that at least for me, I’ll never tire of exploring overdrive sounds. Someone will always come up with a new twist: Use a new material, discover a different chip, configure a different kind of circuit. I suppose eventually all the possibilities will be exhausted, but for now at least, we can enjoy a variety of new ways of expressing our distortion!