Great Eastern FX Co. Design-A-Drive Overdrive

At last, an overdrive that loves all your guitars and amps equally! The DESIGN-A-DRIVE lets you play pedal designer, reshaping the circuit’s frequency response to suit your setup.

With its unique ‘Width’ and ‘Edge’ controls, the Design-a-drive makes dialling in a wide range of killer drive tones completely intuitive.

It’s an overdrive you can set to be as ‘transparent’ and true to your original tone as possible, or configure to do exactly the opposite, making single-coils sound thick and meaty or helping humbuckers really cut through.

There are plenty of overdrive pedals that sound great… provided you’re plugging into a particular style of amp or using the right guitar.

Even though there’s a ‘Tone’ knob on the pedal, the frequency response is essentially baked in – it either suits your needs or it doesn’t. At the same time, pedals that offer more flexibility generally feature an abundance of controls and tend to be fiddly to dial in.

So we set ourselves 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 intuitive and extremely effective tonal adjustment.

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 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 control 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.

We’ve 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.