Overdrive

The overdrive choice.

As most of you know there are three kinds of pedals that will give you the “grit”… Overdrive, distortion, and Fuzz. Often the sound is coming from the amp but if its not its coming from one of these pedals. The most common “distortion” sound you here in modern music is overdrive. If you are going to have one pedal that dirties up your sound I would recommend having an overdrive before you buy any other distortion pedals.
Pedals may include: Fulltone Full-drive, Ibanez TS808, Ibanez Tube screamer, Boss Blues driver, Lovepedal eternity, the Timmy, Klon Centaur, Visual sound Route 808, Xotic BB preamp, Damage Control Womanizer, Voodoo lab Sparkle drive, and even the decent little Danelectro cool cat transparent overdrive. There is a fun comparison video here- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMy_Jt7A1wA
Of course even of the pedals I mentioned there is a variety in price from $39 up to about $400. The cost varies due to quality of design and even more so by the quality of components in the pedal. The technology of an overdrive is pretty old and there is only so much you can change in the style of circuit so that isn’t going to be the biggest impact toward the quality of the pedal. There are so many out there I would recommend putting some in a lineup and see which one jumps out at you for both rhythm and lead lines. Overdrive is often described as the “warmest” of distortions but they vary quite a bit. Without a pretty extensive mod the Boss blues driver is never going to be as warm as the Fulltone full-drive. One of the Big reasons is the Fulltone uses much better components.
I’ll talk more about this in a blog on modding pedals but… most store bought pedals will use a 12 cent capacitor in the tone circuit and a boutique pedal may use a 60 cent cap. Doesn’t matter a bunch if you only make a few for yourself but when you are making 100,000 pedals like Ibanez it makes a big difference. If your pedal cost $25 to make, by the time it gets on the shelf at guitar center they can sell it for $90 and make out fine on each pedal. If they spent twice that (about what I spent building an 808) that would affect the bottom line a lot. Keep your eye out on craig’s list, ebay, and from friends though because you can get a great overdrive and not have to turn to Keeley or Klon to do it.