Overdrive

Transparent and sweet overdrive is yours at the touch of a switch with the East River Drive guitar effects pedal from Electro-Harmonix. A classic JRC4558 IC powers the East River Drive’s symmetrical overdrive that gives your sound some extra hair and edge without compromising your core tone. Use the Volume and Drive knobs to go from a sweet, subtle boost to a searing, harmonically drenched overdrive, then use the Tone dial to finetune your tone’s bite.

Classic ‘60s overdrive tones have never sounded sweeter than with Electro-Harmonix’s Germanium OD guitar effects pedal. A handpicked germanium transistor forms the backbone of this vintage-voiced overdrive pedal. For tone-shaping, there’s a Bias knob that controls the gain level and a Volts dial that lets you choose how much power goes to the germanium transistor. You can crank the latter to the max to pour the full 9V into the transistor or keep it powered down for that sweet starving battery overdrive effect.

The Hot Wax pedal from Electro-Harmonix is what you get when you melt a Hot Tubes and a Crayon together and turn the resulting overdrive soup into a dual-drive stompbox. This powerful dual overdrive pedal lets you use the unique overdrive tones from the Hot Tubes and the Crayon individually or stack them, with the latter driving the former towards highly expressive harmonic complexity. Bass and Tone dials let you sculpt and shape both overdrive tones, while a Blend knob fine-tunes the dirt balance.

The Lumberjack brings a completely new paradigm to the sweet science of overdrive. Instead of a linear curve, the Lumberjack’s overdrive is based on a logarithmic curve. This makes the Lumberjack distort higher frequencies much more compared to lower frequencies, allowing your original tone to cut through the mix while the overdrive floats above it. Plug it in after a modulation pedal and the overdrive won’t oversaturate the already-effected signal. The Lumberjack is also very responsive to your pick attack and comes with true bypass.

Capture the authentic sound of the classic 1969 Muff Fuzz without having to sell your kidney via this reissue from Electro-Harmonix. The Muff Overdrive is a no-nonsense overdrive guitar effects pedal; you get a footswitch and a volume knob to dial in the worn but warm speaker-style overdrive of a vintage tube amp. The Muff Overdrive comes in a rugged, pedalboard-friendly die-cast aluminum chassis and can be powered via a 9V battery or a compatible power supply.

The Soul Food gives you Klon Centaur sound for a fraction of the price. This extremely transparent overdrive guitar effects pedal from Electro-Harmonix gives your signal some extra attitude without compromising your core tone. Boosted power rails in the Soul Food’s circuitry provide extra headroom and enhanced definition, a wide-range Drive control knob lets you dial in everything from a subtle boost to highly saturated distortion, and a dedicated Treble dial lets you control your tone’s bite.

The Germ Drive from Empress Effects gives you a classic warm, harmonically lush overdrive which cleans up with an adjustment of your volume knob. It boasts a natural-sounding tube-like break-up that will improve your sound sans covering the real tone of your instrument. The Germ Drive features a pure analog signal path, and like a tube preamp, it responds nicely to your dynamics. It also has Output control, Gain control, and two EQ bands to transform your sound.

The Modele B is the perfect stompbox for people who love the Fairfield Barbershop overdrive pedal so much that they never even turn it off. It’s a tiny, always-on version of the Barbershop featuring the same circuitry and sound but sans the footswitch and the indicator light. Inside is a jumper that lets you pick between two tonal options: flat and wide, like the original Barbershop and the middle-position tone of the Millenium edition, and a light, high-frequency cut similar to the Millenium edition Barbershop’s right tone position.

Underneath the Barbershop Millenium Edition’s utilitarian design and simple three-knob interface, there lurks a grit-heavy overdrive that’ll make you swoon. Simple controls make this stomp quick to set and easy to use. Drive controls input gain, Volume controls output gain, and Sag lets you control how much voltage it sends to your amp. Use the Barbershop to enhance or quickly grit up a clean amp channel or push an already-dirty channel into harmonically-rich saturation levels.

The Santa Ana Overdrive boasts an all-original circuitry developed by a team knowledgeable in the classic tones Fender is famous for. Packed with FET technology, the Santa Ana allows you to dial in a broad range of tones from a hint of grit to full-on saturated crunch. It is complete with standard controls as well as Bypass and Boost, all arranged in a streamlined format that you can easily read and activate. The Santa Ana Overdrive is housed in a lightweight, sturdy anodized aluminum enclosure.

Friedman Amplification had a huge hit when they bottled the legendary tube amp tone of the Friedman BE-100 amplifier and sold it in compact stompbox form as the BE-OD dual overdrive pedal. They’ve now taken the BE-OD and turned it from single-channel to dual-channel. Channel 1 replicates the sound of the original BE-OD, while Channel 2 is a slightly lower-gain overdrive. Switch between channels to get distinct, perfectly-set overdrive tones for both your rhythm and lead parts.

The Dirty Shirley overdrive pedal doesn’t just share a name with Friedman Amplification’s much-loved Dirty Shirley all-tube amp. It has all of its namesake’s tonal versatility, touch sensitivity, and harmonic richness, too. An intuitive six-knob control set, which mirrors those on the classic Dirty Shirley amp, gives you access to a wide range of classic and modern overdrive tones. From a high-output clean boost to a signal covered in grit, the Dirty Shirley overdrive pedal’s got you covered.

The high-gain road isn’t always the best path to tread, and the Golden Pearl overdrive pedal from Friedman Amplification is the perfect solution for musicians looking for a quality low-gain overdrive. Simple Volume, Drive, and Tone knobs work together with a three-position Hi-Cut switch to let you dial in that perfect, semi-broken up amp tone. A three-position clipping mode switch lets you choose between LED, diode, and no clipping voice options for additional tonal possibilities.

A limited-run custom version of the Fulltone OCD Obsessive Compulsive Drive guitar effects pedal featuring a hot cherry apple red paint job. Aside from the color, this pedal is all OCD. This small and simple stompbox packs some of the sweetest overdrive tones ever crafted and features unprecedented levels of picking sensitivity; once you’ve dialed in your overdriven tone, you can access a wealth of harmonic characteristics and dynamics simply by changing your picking attack.

All the classic overdrive tones—and more!—of the popular late ‘90 pre-MOSFET Fulltone Full-Drive II overdrive guitar effects pedal, sans the clean boost channel. With just three face knobs, the Fulltone Full-Drive 1 is as simple as it gets, but the magic lies in a three-way mode switch that lets you dish out overdrive tones based on previous Full-Drive models. It’s like getting three different Full-Drive pedals in one compact chassis that’s the perfect size for bare bones-style pedalboards.

This is a limited-run colorway for the Fulltone OCD V2 Obsessive Compulsive Drive guitar effects pedal made exclusively for the Chicago Music Exchange. Apart from swapping out the classic cream paint job for black, nothing else was changed. This OCD V2 variant still packs the same sweet, highly responsive tube-style overdrive of the original OCD while adding an output buffer, and enhanced JFET input section, and an internal switch that lets you choose between true bypass and Fulltone’s unique enhanced bypass mode.