What You Need To Know About Overdrive Pedals
In this article, I'm going to help you sort through the thousands of overdrive options and understand that they basically all come from six types of pedals. We're going to make the complicated stuff simple, and I’m 100% here for it. You guys know me pretty well at this point. I’m a huge nerd. I’m Indiana Jones if he stayed in the classroom and taught archeology instead of going on that quest to find the Holy Grail. I’m Bill Nye with guitar pedals instead of test tubes.
All that to say, I’m pumped to teach y’all about overdrives.
I know that most people who watch the JHS Show and read these articles already know everything about pedals and life in general. I’m aware that most of you just watch me as a representation of how you don't want to live your own life. You think, “Man, Josh, that guy's weird. He's crazy.” I get it. I’m not offended. But there are some of you reading this who don't know everything and I really want to help you today. I want to talk about overdrives.
There are literally thousands of overdrive pedals on the market, with new ones added almost daily. It can be really overwhelming to understand what overdrive you need, what overdrives you like, why you like the ones you like and why you don't really like others. So, this article is beautifully simple. I'm going to play a clean Fender-style amp. I'm going to play a Seuf Old Hand, Telecaster-style guitar, bridge pickup only, with the volume and tone knob all the way up.
I’m going to play through six distinct categories of overdrive, teaching you what each one is, the pedals that are in that style, and let you hear all of them in the same frame of reference. By the end of this article, hopefully you’ll know why you like what you like and why you don't like what you don't like. Maybe you'll even discover some new options you haven't tried.
I'm really excited. Let's get going.
Soft Clipping / Tube Screamer
The first category I want to cover is the most popular, most used, and most familiar category of overdrive out there. Period. It's been around since the late seventies. I’m talking about soft clipping overdrives. Now, the first type of overdrive within this category that you have definitely seen and possibly love (or possibly hate) is the Tube Screamer.
Let’s be honest. The Tube Screamer is the McDonald’s of the pedal world. Everyone secretly loves it, it’s just that some people are ashamed to admit it. But these pedals are insanely popular for a reason. It’s just an awesome circuit. The Tube Screamer has been cloned, copied, modified... This circuit has been used thousands and thousands of times, which is pretty bonkers when you realize that the first guitar pedal ever debuted around 1962.
That’s a lot of progress for roughly sixty years. I’m just sayin’.
In my own line, I've had up to ten versions of this pedal in some form or fashion. Now, pedals like my Bonsai Overdrive cover multiple versions of the Tube Screamer. Throughout history, we have pedals like the EarthQuaker Plumes, the Seymour Duncan 805, the Fulltone Full-Drive, the BOSS SD-1 Super Overdrive, and even pedals like the East River by Electro Harmonix. These are all soft clipping Tube Screamer style overdrives. The distinctive factor in the Tube Screamer style is that it's not transparent. This overdrive is meant to be heard. It actually adds and boosts the mid frequencies, causing your guitar to cut through a mix really well. It makes things feel thicker than they should and more saturated than other soft clippers.
When we demoed this in today’s episode, I used the EarthQuaker Plumes. This is a great modern, mid-heavy take on the classic Tube Screamer.
Soft Clipping / Bluesbreaker
The second style of overdrive within the soft clipping overdrive category is the Bluesbreaker-style overdrive. Now this came about in the 1990s, when Marshall made this Bluesbreaker pedal based around an old amplifier. We actually did an episode on this called What Is a Bluesbreaker? which I highly recommend. That video goes into more detail, but basically Analogman designed the King of Tone around this circuit, which started a trend among other builders to try their hand at the Bluesbreaker circuit.
We see pedals like my Morning Glory, like the Fox Catcher, the Black Box overdrive, the Butah by CMAT, and even Brian Wampler has the Pantheon. Now the difference between the Bluesbreaker style and the Tube Screamer comes down to a buzzword: the Bluesbreaker sound is transparent, whereas the Tube Screamer that I showed earlier has a mid-frequency hump that is not transparent. The Bluesbreaker is going to sound like what your guitar and amp sound like naturally, just a little bit dirtier, whereas the Tube Screamer is going to add some unnatural tonality, but in the best possible way.
And just like the Tube Screamer, all of those variations on the Bluesbreaker are slightly different. They might have little tweaks and sounds and things that builders like myself like to do to our designs, but these are all Bluesbreakers-style pedals.
Hard Clipping / Overdrive & Distortion
The next category of overdrive I want to walk you through is called hard clipping, unlike the Tube Screamer and Bluesbreaker that are soft clipping (meaning that there are diodes within the loop of the op-amp, so it doesn’t fully distort or “clip” the signal). By contrast, these hard clipping effects actually put the diodes at the end of the circuit, which means that every bit of your guitar signal is clipped in some way. So, hard-clipped overdrives are, by definition, not as smooth and not as easy on the guitar.
Basically this is really fun for everyone except the guitar**.
**M. Night Shymalan, I’ve got your next mind-bending film ready to go: you follow the story of a rock-and-roll guitarist over his career, the highs and the lows, and at the end of his life, when he’s on his deathbed, clutching his Fender Stratocaster (as one does), he realizes that his guitar was sentient the entire time. Zoom in on his eyes as they widen in shock. Cut to one jangly chord from the electric guitar as its LED lights slowly dim. And roll credits.
The first form of this hard clipping I want to talk about is the 1970 style overdrive/distortion. I did an episode on this called “1970’s Op-Amp Distortion.” It's really cool, riveting, and has some dramatic, soap-opera-type information in it. You might want to check it out.
That said, two great examples of this type of overdrive are the DOD Overdrive Preamp 250 and the MXR M-104 Distortion +. These both came out in the early 1970s, before soft clipping was ever a thing, and they are almost identical, but over the years a lot of people have tweaked this circuit and done a lot of different things with this type of idea, utilizing an op-amp, pushing over diodes, and hard clipping the sound and the waveform.
Some of my favorites are the classics, like the Distortion + and the DOD 250, but there are a ton of great options in this category. Black Arts Toneworks Quantum Mystic is amazing. It is a DOD 250, but with a really powerful, really useful EQ. I say that because a lot of people try to add EQ to this and it ruins the circuit, but Toneworks sidestepped that problem. The Spiral Electric FX Yellow Spiral Drive is a fantastic take on this as well. We have the Daredevil Drive-Bi, which is a slightly more aggressive take on the distortion. And then we have the super famous Fulltone OCD; there's a ton of these out there.
Hard Clipping / Klon Centaur
There are lots of different styles of hard clipping that blur the line between overdrive and distortion, but there is one pedal that basically rules them all. Obviously, I’m talking about the Klon Centaur. It came around in the mid-nineties, it’s the definition of iconic. Everyone's obsessed with this pedal. Although it’s a hard clipper, a lot of people get this confused and think it's a Bluesbreaker or a Tube Screamer. It's not. It's a fairly unique circuit, and it does some interesting stuff. Now, it’s important to know that this pedal has this very strange arrangement inside of it, where the gain control is actually two potentiometers turning at the same time. Because of the way that it blends in the gain signal, you almost always have your clean signal going.
Like I said. It’s pretty much one-of-a-kind.
This feature really sets the Klon Centaur apart from other hard clippers, which are rather raspy at times (though I’ll be the first to admit that rasp/grit is also an awesome effect). This is always clean and has a really distinct EQ that holds together no matter how dirty you set it. Now, the Klon Centaur supposedly has mystical diodes that you can only find in Rivendell or maybe Hobbiton. People talk about this a lot, and it really tickles me when I hear people say, “I can hear the mystical diodes,” and they have their gain knob turned off. There’s just one problem with that: if you don't run the gain knob on a Klon up in the top 75%, 60% up, you're not going to hear the diodes. You just won’t.
So, I can safely say that I ride the line between being a sheeple and a superfan of this thing. I’ll be the first to admit that this diode -- or any diode, for that matter -- is not unclonable. The Wampler Tumnus is a super solid replica of the Klon Centaur circuit, and it sells for roughly $4800 cheaper, so it’s a great option. That said, I still love the original unit, because it’s iconic and ridiculous and amazing. Just like all great guitar pedals.
Basically, just know that the Klon Centaur is a hard clipper. If you turn the gain up or if you don't, at the end of the day it's a really fancy boost pedal that sounds awesome.
There are several other great versions of this pedal. A few of my favorites include the Ceriatone Centura overdrive, the Archer by Rocket (which is really, really popular), the Wampler Tumnus (which is very small and convenient for certain boards), and the Joyo Tauren. My all-time favorite has to be the Way Huge Smalls Conspiracy Theory. This is the pedal that 2020 birthed, and so if nothing else good came out of this year, at least we got this pedal.
Transistor-Based Overdrives Without an Op-Amp
The last category I want to go over is transistor-based overdrives without an op-amp. In my opinion, these guys are kind of the unsung hero of overdrives. They’re not talked about enough, and a lot of people haven’t tried them out. I’m encouraging you to check out some of these. Trust me. You will not regret it.
So, basically, this type of pedal doesn’t have a soft clipping section within an op-amp, like a Tube Screamer or a Bluesbreaker, and they don't have hard clipping like these overdrives/distortions we looked at. It's made up of transistors in stages, cascading like multiple boosts pedals, all hitting each other. It works in the same way that a tube amp works.
When you turn it up, things are saturating, hitting other things. You see this format most often in the really early fuzz pedals, but these examples I'm going to show you are definitely overdrives and they're really cool. They have a lot of touch response, meaning if you pick light, they tend to stay clean. If you pick heavier, they get dirty.
It actually responds to the intensity with which you play. This is the future. This is music. I love it.
The BOSS BD-2 Blues Driver is legendary, and this Waza Craft version is fantastic. It’s one of my favorite pedals ever, and I basically stumbled into my career as a pedal-maker when I fixed one of these. Robert Keeley has the Super Phat Mod, which has all of his legendary mods in one pedal (bear in mind that he did two Bluesbreakers back in the day). In the ’90s, we got the Ibanez Mostortion MT-10, which uses MOSFETs and an arrangement of cascading sounds. Danelectro has a clone of this that’s really solid quality, too!
Amps In a Box
Within this category of transistor-discrete overdrives, there's a parallel subject here: amps in a box. And yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like.
When I think of amps in a box, I think of things like the ZVEX Box of Rock, which uses transistors in cascading stages just like an amp, and it sounds like a Marshall. Other great versions of this circuit include the Wampler Plexi Drive (a British overdrive). This is legendary and sounds fantastic. It’s my favorite Wampler pedal because it gets the job done; those cascading transistors sound like a really nice Marshall without the price tag or noise level. I've done a couple of amps in a box, like the Twin Twelve (which sounds like a Silvertone 1484) and the Charlie Brown (which sounds like the classic JTM45 Marshall).
It’s definitely worth checking out some of these lesser known pedals because, let’s be real, everyone’s played a Tube Screamer. Now, I love the Tube Screamer. If we have to explain rock-and-roll to aliens, that’s the guitar pedal that we’re sending into space, no doubt. But it’s always worth it to try a new style, a new effect.
Who knows? You may be one jam session away from having a new favorite pedal.