The Jetter Pedal X is an overdrive pedal from Jetter Gear. Delicious Audio described it as "a unique-sounding overdrive"1. It sits in the overdrive family alongside the rest of the maker's drive pedals, such as the Jetter JetDrive and Jetter Gain Stage Red.
How it gets its gain
Many overdrives get their saturated tone from a clipping stage, most often diodes that shape the guitar's signal as it breaks up. The Pedal X takes a different route. As Delicious Audio put it, "There is no clipping stage (diodes or otherwise) in this design." Instead, the circuit balances five gain stages and uses positive feedback in critical locations to build its gain1.
The maker's approach means the pedal reaches its drive without diodes: as the coverage put it, "it doesn't have diodes"1. For a player, that places the Pedal X apart from the many overdrive designs that shape their gain through diode clipping. Where a diode-clipping design fixes the character of the breakup at the clipping stage, the Pedal X builds its saturation across five stages instead, which is the design choice behind the site's "unique-sounding" description1.
How it sounds
What it sounds like is a matter for those who have played it, and the published verdict comes from Delicious Audio's coverage of the release. On the design as a whole, the site's conclusion was:
"the result is a big, dynamic performer that has unusual sustain and definition"
Two words in that verdict matter to a player weighing it against a conventional overdrive. "Dynamic" points at how the pedal responds to picking strength and guitar volume, the quality players usually mean when they say a drive cleans up well. "Sustain" and "definition" together describe note edges that hold without smearing, which is where diode-clipped designs most often trade one for the other1.
Videos
Mike Hermans
Jeff McErlain
Brad Jeter
Sources (1)
- Jetter Pedal X Overdrive, Delicious Audio, 2020-11-25
