Tonefiend Forum

Hello friends, I am in the market for an analog overdrive pedal.I am looking for something to goes from a glassy clean boost to medium distortion. I apologize if this question is redundant and the answer is somewhere here in the forum posts. I play fenders and carparelli guitars with seymour duncan single coils and humbuckers through a mark sheets boutique tube amp.i play mostly blues and classic rock stuff. I am aware of the ethos overdrive, then zen pedal and the barber overdrive. All of these sound great to me in yt videos. Any suggestions would be great. 🙂

Glassy isn’t something I hear often or like much when I do in a typical opamp & clipper overdrive pedal. Might be more of that available in a Rat with the gain down and the filter open. Nine times out of ten or more I prefer the Rat this way to a proper overdrive pedal. However, when I was a young guy and thought of myself as more of a blues and classic rock player I didn’t like the Rat because it can be a bit rough and jagged-y.

Soul Food indeed does sound like a good cheap option. I don’t like JHS for some of his sketchiness in lifting other builders’ designs, but his Soul Food mods seem fairly reasonably priced if you need things a tick better than stock and don’t want to solder SMD components yourself.

Quote from bear on March 22, 2014, 09:24
Soul Food indeed does sound like a good cheap option. I don’t like JHS for some of his sketchiness in lifting other builders’ designs, but his Soul Food mods seem fairly reasonably priced if you need things a tick better than stock and don’t want to solder SMD components yourself.

I got a Soul Food/ JHS mod recently as a tip for doing a quick emergency tube amp repair I do very little repair work due to my failed back these days (I love my few old “pet customers” I have them well trained after all these many many years). Any way the Soul Food sounds pretty good and the JHS mods can help tune it to specific amps. Does it sound like a Klon Centaur? I fixed a few and used to do pedal boards with them (I’ve probably played 25-30 different ones over the years and honestly there were many that sounded like sine waves of gold but on the other hand many seemed just OK. The Soul Food is definitely in the ball park of the Klon Centaur but the Soul Food seems almost too perfect until you start playing with the JHS control and switch additions. But I like it and will probably keep it on my pedal board. The Soul Food sounds great with extra dirt ahead of it, I’ve put both a Pigtronix Fat Drive and Earthquaker Hoof fuzz in front of it with great results. Seems like a heck of a pedal for the price and the JHS mods are reasonably priced IMHO.