Blackeye Effects Gold Pine Overdrive

The Gold Pine Overdrive is a guitar effects pedal from Blackeye Effects, an overdrive that Pedal of the Day featured on February 12, 2015. According to that site's reviewer, writing under the name Hooligan Gorilla, the Gold Pine, along with its sibling the White Pine, is based on the Crowther Hotcake circuit, so it is a take on a familiar design rather than something built from scratch.¹²

The pedal's most distinctive control is its presence knob, and how you set it changes the character of the pedal considerably¹.

The presence knob

The presence knob is not a typical tone knob. Pedal of the Day's reviewer describes it as controlling the mids instead, so it shapes the body of the sound rather than rolling off treble the way a conventional tone control would.¹

That fully-left setting matters for players who want the pedal to add gain without coloring their basic tone. Raise it and the mids come up, which the reviewer found interacts with the amp you are playing through¹.

How it behaves with different amps

The reviewer's findings split along amp lines:

• Fender amps (DDRI, Blues Junior, HRDX, Champ): the pedal gets a bit harsh and fizzy towards the upper range of gain. He liked it best with the presence, which he notes controls the mids, set low around 9 o'clock.¹
• Vox and Blackstar amps: he called it a very different experience, saying the pedal sounds great all the way through the range of gain and produces really nice saturated driven tones. He also found it sounded better through these amps with the presence turned up to about 12 o'clock.¹

As a boost and at higher gain

At the lower end of its gain range, the reviewer found the Gold Pine works well as a boost or light gain pedal for edge-of-breakup tones, the point where an amp or pedal is just starting to break into distortion. With humbuckers and the gain turned up, he was also able to really nail some early Noel Gallagher Oasis style tones.¹

If you are weighing it against other drives, it sits in the same broad territory covered on our pages for distortion and fuzz pedals, though as a Hotcake-based design it is its own thing rather than a Tube Screamer style mid-humped drive¹.

Questions