Volta Custom The Blue

The Blue is the flagship overdrive from Volta Custom, an Italian pedal builder that Delicious Audio describes as "a new Italian pedal builder dedicated to high-end, hand-made, super-tweakable dirt boxes"¹. It is a drive aimed squarely at blues players, built around transparency and dynamics rather than a heavily colored tone¹.

What sets The Blue apart from a basic overdrive is its extra boost stage. This is not a shared knob or an internal trimmer: the boost has its own dedicated footswitch and its own knobs, so it can be brought in and out while playing like a second pedal living in the same box¹.

A transparent overdrive with a separate boost

Delicious Audio's writeup frames The Blue as a drive where "transparency and dynamics are the name of the game"¹. For a player, that means the pedal is designed to push an already good amp tone harder rather than replace it with its own voice, the approach also associated with low-gain transparent overdrives like the Tone City Blue Crystal, which Tone City itself calls "a low-gain transparent overdrive"².

The boost is the other half of the design. When turned on, it works simultaneously on the pre gain and the post effect level, and the two boost amounts are independently adjustable¹. In practice that means you can decide separately how much extra drive the boost adds into the front of the circuit and how much extra volume comes out the end, which is useful for setting a lead level that also thickens up.

This two-part boost idea appears elsewhere in the blue corner of the pedal world. The Bogner Ecstasy Blue has a footswitchable boost that raises volume and gain at the same time, set by two small potentiometers beneath the main volume and gain knobs³, and the Bogner Ecstasy Blue Mini carries a boost with independently lit volume and gain controls⁴. The Blue's take differs in giving the boost its own footswitch and external knobs rather than trimmers, so the settings can be changed on the fly.

The controls and toggle switches

The Blue's main tone shaping comes from a two band equalizer that modifies bass and treble level. In its flat position the EQ does not affect the general tone, so it can be used purely as a corrective tool when a guitar or amp needs it¹.

On top of that sit four toggle switches, each conferring a different character on the tone. Delicious Audio lists their names as Body, Grease, Head and Sheen, and notes that they "will satisfy the more tweaking-prone guitarist"¹. What each switch does to the circuit is not documented beyond that, so a player trying one should expect to explore them by ear.

A table of the control surface:

Toggle switches that reshape character are a recurring feature on overdrives from this part of the market. The Beetronics Overhive "Blue Blocks" uses a Body switch for a low end boost or for compensating when switching guitars mid-set, and Oneder Effects builds its Old Blue Overdrive V2 around a weight knob that runs from more transparent below noon to thicker V1-style sounds from noon to max⁵. The Blue's four toggles put more of that kind of shaping on the outside of the pedal than either of those designs.

Bypass and placement

The Blue is true bypass. In this mode the pedal is electrically isolated from the signal when off, so it cannot influence the tone passing through it¹. For a player deciding where the pedal sits on a board, that means it can sit early in the chain without loading down the signal when disengaged, though as with any true bypass pedal, long cable runs after it are worth thinking about separately.

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