Ibanez OD9 Overdrive

The Ibanez OD9 Overdrive is a vintage overdrive pedal made by Ibanez for a brief window in 1982 and 1983¹. It belongs to the 9 Series, the same era as the Ibanez TS9 Tube Screamer, but it is a much rarer animal: ToneHome, which maintains detailed reference pages on vintage Ibanez pedals, describes its availability as extremely rare and its collectibility as extremely high¹.

What makes the OD9 unusual is that it was never really its own product. It uses the circuit board of the earlier Ibanez OD-850 Overdrive, and most of its enclosures are repainted TS9 and SD9 cases, so in ToneHome's words it is literally built of leftovers¹. It also never appeared in the official Ibanez catalogs¹.

Built on the OD850 board

The OD9's electronics come straight from the Ibanez OD-850, an overdrive pedal that predates the 9 Series. ToneHome's OD9 page states plainly that the OD9 uses the OD-850 pcb¹. Kit Rae's history of overdrive and distortion pedals, which traces the family trees of these circuits, agrees and goes further: the Ibanez Overdrive OD-9, circa 1982, uses the same pcb as the Maxon OD-801 and the third edition of the Ibanez OD-850².

The OD-850 itself has a longer story. Kit Rae notes that the Ibanez Overdrive OD-850 was produced by the Nisshin Onpa company, the Japanese firm whose Maxon brand built pedals for Ibanez under OEM arrangements². ToneHome lists the OD-850 as an overdrive pedal from the earlier First Series³, and the line eventually came back: Ibanez reissued the OD850 in 2016, with RockBoard's PedalPedia recording it as the OD850 Overdrive 2016 Reissue by Ibanez⁴. MusicRadar reported at the time that the updated version adds true bypass switching, an on/off LED and a DC power jack⁵. ToneHome likewise notes the new ones have LED and DC power jack added³.

Not a Tube Screamer, despite the name

The OD9's name invites confusion with the Maxon OD-9, a pedal that appeared in the same era. They are not the same circuit. Vintage Guitar magazine reviewed the Maxon OD-9 as an Ibanez TS-9-inspired overdrive⁶¹, and Guitar World's history of Maxon and the Tube Screamer describes the OD-9 as one of two pedals that repackaged the 808 design, alongside the Ibanez TS9, with the circuit remaining largely the same⁷⁸. Godlyke, Maxon's distributor, makes the separation explicit for the modern reissue:

ToneHome puts it more bluntly for the vintage Ibanez pedal: the OD9 was not reissued at all, and the Maxon OD9 is just another Tube Screamer¹.

The shared look is no accident, though. Most OD9 enclosures are repainted TS9 and SD9 cases¹, so an OD9 in the wild usually wears the same small 9 Series box as the TS9, a pedal ToneHome also rates as extremely high in collectibility¹⁰¹. Under the paint, however, the OD9 runs the OD-850 board rather than the Tube Screamer circuit.

Rarity and collectibility

The OD9 sits at the far end of the rarity scale among vintage Ibanez pedals¹²:

• Produced in extremely small quantities¹
• Never listed in the official Ibanez catalogs¹
• Availability rated extremely rare¹
• Collectibility rated extremely high¹
• 1983 list price not available¹

Kit Rae's history calls the Ibanez OD-9 one of the more rare variants of the Maxon D&S and Ibanez Overdrive line, and the most expensive on the collector market, noting that very few of this version were made, making them very collectible².

Two details point to where those few units went. ToneHome reports that rumor has it all OD9 units were built for the French market only¹. The pedal's paperwork backs that up in part: unlike the rest of the 9 Series manuals, which were printed in English, German and French, the OD9's owner's manual is French only¹. ToneHome hosts a scan of that French-language manual on its OD9 page¹.

For a player who encounters one today, the practical picture is this: an original OD9 is a collector's piece built from leftover parts of other Ibanez pedals, running the same circuit as the OD-850, and priced accordingly on the vintage market. The circuit itself is far easier to find in the 2016 OD850 reissue⁴¹, and the Tube Screamer family it is often mistaken for is covered separately on the Ibanez TS9 and Ibanez TS808 pages.

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