Effectrode Tube Drive

The Effectrode Tube Drive is an analog overdrive and booster pedal made by Effectrode, and its defining feature is that it is built around real vacuum tubes rather than solid-state clipping. The pedal contains three twin-triode vacuum tubes operating at real amp plate voltage of 300 V DC, which is the kind of operating voltage found inside a valve amplifier, not the few volts most pedals run their internals at¹.

RockBoard's PedalPedia describes the sound as "immense, harmonically-saturated and super-smooth, able to go from mild bluesy breakup to full-on blistering"¹. In other words, the pedal is intended to cover the whole range from a touch of grit to full distortion, which places it in the same broad territory as other overdrive pedals that reach into distortion territory.

How the circuit works

The Tube Drive uses cascaded six-stage tube circuitry that is precision-biased to generate highly symmetrical clipping distortion¹. Symmetrical clipping is the same general approach used in classic soft-clipping overdrives, but here the clipping is done by tube stages running at 300 V DC rather than by diodes or transistors at pedal voltages. That high plate voltage is the point of the design: the tubes behave as they would in an amplifier, which is where the pedal's harmonic saturation comes from.

Power

The pedal runs from 12V DC, center negative, and draws 1mA¹. Check that your power supply offers a 12V output before adding it to a board.

Tube Drive pedals compared

The Tube Drive is one of several overdrives that put actual tubes, or tube-style circuits, in a pedal:

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