08/25/26 the overdrive trials

my good friend samuel is just an all around stellar lad. but what one thing I really appreciate about him deeply is his ability to discern every little tonal variation each circuit has to offer. 

A lot of people think that one overdrive is all you need and that every overdrive is "just another overdrive" I could not disagree further. Maybe we are just sensitive individuals, but myself for example, my choice of overdrive is the klon centaur style, which is why I have formulated the my glass shard variant. A tube screamer, bluesbreaker, ocd could not replace what I get out of that circuit. I would be okay with a timmy or blues driver instead, but still they are not the same.

It is arguable that generally they do almost the same thing.

I do not like the argument that people could not tell in a mix which overdrives you are using. I would agree they could not tell which is which, but I think generally people can hear a difference between lets say a tube screamer vs a timmy style overdrive. The timmy naturally has a deeper low to low mid crunch, with strong clean presence in the highs, while the tube screamer has the high/high mid boost, with a low cut, glassier feel, overall thinner and less gain.

Anyways, Sam is an overdrive enthusiast. He got his original timmy stolen from his car here in Los Angeles, so your boy fronted him my recipe of that circuit, the tommy gun. He fell so in love with it that it is one of the few pedals that actually has consistently remained in heavy usage. He has also taken it to various studios and gigs and seemingly started a local cult following and acknowledgement of the tommy gun.

So, he liked it so much he wanted a fixed mode dual timmy.

He also threw in a cool request, he said at one point he has a small sound big sound fuck overdrive, but he sold it and wanted one back. But he felt it could be smaller and he personally did not have use for the broken mode momentary switch.

I am always more than game to try out a new circuit and I really love engineering things to be more compact forms than their originals. Space matters.

So that pedal to the left is a small format small sound big sound fuck. A unique jfet overdrive with broken envelope op amp bad bias broken chip mode that sounds really cool. But the overdrive itself has an extremely unique texture. It has a wonderful balance of blown out and articulate with a bit of broken decay as well. Loud and high output with tons of saturation, we sat, listened, ripped em through the model T, and studied.

Both were to his satisfaction. Beyond satisfaction, my man sam was stoked which always makes me happy because he definitely is a harsh critic and some circuit I really like he has expressed he is not fond of.

If you read all that and want either pedal, let me know. They can be made again.