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Great Eastern FX Co. Design-a-Drive Overdrive Pedal
A versatile & easy-to-use overdrive that you can redesign on the fly — to deliver exactly what you, your guitar & amp require!
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SKU: GEFX-DAD
Great Eastern FX Co.'s Design-a-Drive is an op amp-based, hard-clipping overdrive that lets you play pedal designer. You can reshape the circuit’s frequency response to perfectly suit your setup, making it an overdrive that essentially loves all your guitars and amps equally! With its unique 'Width' and 'Edge' controls, the Design-a-Drive makes dialling in a wide range of killer tones completely intuitive and most importantly — fun!
It’s a low-to-medium gain overdrive that you can set to be as "transparent" and true to your original tone as possible, or you can configure the unit to do exactly the opposite. Make single-coils sound thick and beefy, help humbuckers really cut through in a mix, and more!
Not Your Normal Overdrive...
There are countless overdrive pedals out there, and loads of them sound great — provided you're plugging into a particular style of amp or using the right guitar. Even though most of these feature a 'Tone' knob to adjust the brightness, the frequency response is essentially "baked in". It either suits your needs, or it doesn’t. And at the same time, stompboxes that offer more flexibility generally feature an abundance of controls and tend to be fiddly and time-consuming to dial-in.
Great Eastern FX Co. therefore set themselves a challenge: to design an overdrive that was as flexible as possible, while remaining really simple to use. That meant designing some new "tone" controls that would actually get at the parts of the frequency spectrum that matter. The Design-a-Drive's 'Edge' and 'Width' controls are not based on a traditional amp tone stack or pedal EQ. Instead, they combine multiple functions in one to offer genuinely effective tonal adjustment.
Simple Yet Powerful Controls
'Edge' controls the top-end of the frequency spectrum, simultaneously adjusting two separate filters — a gentle treble roll-off and a more intense cut in the high presence region — as well as affecting the aggressiveness of the circuit's hard-clipping diodes. These three functions combine to do exactly what the name suggests; letting you dial-in precisely the desired amount of bite, grit and brightness.
Like 'Edge', the 'Width' knob does exactly what the name suggests. This six-position rotary switch reshapes the pedal's mid-range response, progressively introducing a lower mid-range peak and adding more bass as you go from 'Thin' to 'Fat'. This control lets you instantly sculpt your tone while also dictating where across the frequency spectrum your amp gets pushed.
Great Eastern FX Co. designed the 'Gain' and 'Level' controls to be equally useful and wide-ranging. With the gain turned down, there’s still plenty of level on tap, allowing the pedal to act as a powerful tone-shaper and clean boost — on its own or stacked with other drives and fuzzes.
Reviews
"The Design‑a‑Drive from Great Eastern FX is the first pedal I have come across that allows you to really substantially tune its overdrive characteristics to match the requirements of a large range of amps. Yes, I know there are drive pedals with three‑band EQs, and internal tweak pots, but this is different... Using a six‑way rotary switch to set the mid-range characteristic and a clever, complementary ‘highs’ control, results in something that’s both more effective and more intuitive in use than anything that has gone before, in my experience." - Dave Lockwood, Sound On Sound
"The second pedal from plucky newbie Great Eastern is another high-class crunch box, but with an intriguing new angle. What’s missing? Absolutely nothing. This is a stunning little pedal, even better than Great Eastern’s debut, and we’re not going to eat our dinner until you’ve tried one." - Guitar.com
Specifications
- Size: 125 x 66 x 55 mm (4.9 x 2.6 x 2.2 inches)
- Weight: 320g (0.7lb)
- Current Draw: ~10mA
- Power Requirements: 9V DC mains adaptor only (not included)
- Top-Mounted Jacks: Saves precious pedalboard real-estate!
- Made in Cambridge, England, UK.
Customer Reviews
Mr. Andrew Smith10th Sep 2022
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