Budda Om Overdrive

The Budda Om Overdrive is an overdrive stompbox from Budda, listed as an official Budda product on the HeadRush/Revalver site¹. Budda describes its gain knob as controlling the amount of distortion, from vintage overdrive to gain that starts to cross into fuzz territory².

What it does

Budda pitched the Om as a higher-gain overdrive with a focused voice. In the announcement, the company described it as having "plenty of gain for modern music, but also focuses the EQ in such a way to make sure solos get heard!"²

The single control described in the announcement is the gain knob: "The gain knob controls the amount of distortion, from vintage overdrive to gain that starts to cross into fuzz territory"². At the top of its range it overlaps with what you would expect from distortion and fuzz pedals, while lower settings sit in conventional overdrive territory. Budda's other overdrive from the same line, the Budda ZenMan, took a different approach as a combined overdrive and boost.

The circuit, as documented by builders

The Om has also been traced by the DIY community. On the Tagboard Effects blog, a builder working from the schematic corrected an early reading of a capacitor, noting it was a 1uF rather than 1nF, and updated the layout accordingly³. A later comment on the same page reported the circuit as an op-amp plus transistor design, with the builder preferring an LF353 op-amp and an MPSA18 transistor after trying BC550, 2n2222 and 2n3904 transistors³.

That verdict is one player's experience with a hand-built copy rather than a factory pedal, and it sits alongside the same thread's report that the preferred parts combination worked for that builder³.

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