Looking for a great blues overdrive pedal?  Then check out the MI Audio Blues Pro Overdrive.  This low-medium gain overdrive provides great sounds for everything from a light blues to great classic rock tones.  The booster is very clean and transparent when you’ve got the gain down, but it certainly lights up when you add in more and more gain.  Then you’ve got the tone control, which gives you everything from a nice, tight sound to a mellow, smooth overdrive.  There’s no odd muffled tomes or any tinny sounds when you crank it to the extreme, either.  The Fuzz switch then gives you the option to move the Audio Blues Pro to Fuzz mode, a mode that focuses on tones from the 1960s. (more...)

Looking for an incredibly responsive overdrive with a sweet warm tone?  Need this overdrive to be versatile enough to pair with any amp or guitar?  If so, then you need a Fairfield Circuitry Barbershop Overdrive Pedal.  This pedal keeps it's signature vintage sound with added gain, and it is super responsive.  The pedal will responds to the nuances of your pick attack, and it breaks up naturally, like a tube amp.  If you ease back on your picking, the pedal can be more transparent and just add some fatness so that the natural tone of the guitar will really come through.

The overdrive features a Sag knob to mimic tube rectifier sag.  By simulating Sag on an amp, the knob opens up many overdrive possibilities.  If you want spongey tones, just roll the Sag knob back a bit.  The more it’s turned, the tighter and more compressed your sound will become.  This pedal is all about subtlety and can really add variety and unique tonal shapes to your sound.  The entire pedal is made from a thick, unfinished metal case that is incredibly durable.  It’s powered by a 9 volt dc.  With this great amount of variety, you may think the Fairfield Circuitry Barbershop Overdrive Pedal will cost a lot, but it’s only $160. (more...)

Big John is a pedal company located in Ghent, Belgium.  They’re known for creating some very unique and interesting pedals.  Their naming scheme is also certainly unique—you won’t forget the name of any of the Big John pedals!  Their pedals have been used in diverse outfits such as Nine Inch Nails, Beck, Macy Gray, and Paul McCartney.

The man behind the Big John pedals is bassplayer Jan Detremerie.  He graduated from the Royal Conservatory of Music in Brussels with a master degree, and while he primarily is a bassplayer, he also loves trying out different pedals and creating new sounds.

Big John has created a number of different pedals, each of which has something to offer.  There’s the Big John Granny Puker, for example.  This overdrive pedal lets you switch between overdrive, octave down, or a mixture of the two.  This gives players a huge range of options, especially since you can control the blending of the sounds to make your own unique tone.

Another Big John product is the uniquely named Big John Harry Balls Effects Pedal.  This fuzz pedal has a rich fuzz tone and a transistor boost that you can use with or without the fuzz.  It offers both clean boost and scratchy boost.  If you want some really nasty fuzz, this is the pedal for you.

The third and final pedal offered by Big John is called the Obama Wah.  It’s a distortion pedal that provides a lot of gain and tone, but it also has a switchable fixed wah mode that can create some very interesting textures. (more...)

UK effects manufacturers produce a number of great pedals to offer the world, and one of them is the Blackstar HT Drive.  This overdrive pedal features great vintage overdrive, creamy, warm, and rich saturation, and more.  It uses dual cascaded ECC83 high voltage triode stages that allow it to move from the subtle boost to a valve saturation without adding any fizz to the sound.  The lack of fizz is all thanks to the A-Class tone control.  It produces only a nice, saturated tone that compliments your instrument.

This incredibly dynamic overdrive pedal will have you thinking of a great tube amp. The volume and tone knobs give you the flexibility to really zone in on the right blend, and the high integrity buffered bypass will give you all the overdrive you want without any of the coloring you don’t.  For direct recordings, the Blackstar HT Drive features speaker emulated output that sounds amazing. (more...)

Empress Effects is a pedal company that focuses on providing players with devices that are original, high-quality products for tone sculpting.  The company produces reasonably priced pedals from their workshop in Ottawa, Canada.  Their core group consists of four experts: Steve, Mike, Jason, and Dan.

Steve has been working with electronics for years, and he holds a degree in Electrical Engineering.  He has over a dozen years of musical experience, and it was this experience that led him to forming Empress Effects.  When the work picked up, he brought in Mike, a man with years of experience in assembly management.  Jason was added to the team to help work on the Empress Superdelay and the Empress ParaEq.  Finally, Dan handles much of the actually business, leaving the others free to work on making new pedals.

So far, there are four different pedals in the Empress Effects lineup.  The first is the Empress Tap Tremolo, a pedal designed to provide many interesting oscillation features without losing any tone.  It’s a completely original pedal.

The Empress Superdelay provides basic delay, as one might expect, but it also brings in much more.  It gives you control over just about every aspect of your delay and sound, allowing you to create some of the most interesting textures ever.

If you want to really enhance and change up your tone, the Empress ParaEq brings in much more control that standard ep pedals.  It really gives you the ability to control every aspect of your tone from a eq standpoint. (more...)

Guitarist Robin Trower has played with a number of bands, and over the years, he has searched for that perfect overdrive pedal.  Finally, he sat down with Fulltone and helped create the Fulltone Robin Trower Signature Overdrive.  This pedal can almost be described as having a full tube amp in a box, it’s so dynamic.  However, it’s not just another version of the OCD pedal.  Instead, it’s a huge overdrive pedal that really delivers amp-like response, clarity, and versatility.  It really delivers Robin Trower’s signature tone, and if that’s what you’re looking for, your search has come to an end. (more...)