And the winner is...

So after much deliberation I have finally settled on and purchased a new distortion/overdrive pedal! As you may already know I have been searching for a great sounding dual overdrive pedal for some time and every indicator was pointing towards the ever popular fulltone full drive 2. Despite this the sudden boom in this pedals popularity over here in the UK got me thinking outside the box... "Do I still really want to sound like everyone else?" I said out loud to myself. I mean I was getting rid of a boss overdrive and a Rat so that I could focus on getting MY tone!

The winner was the fantastic T Rex Dr. Swamp... Two independently switchable identical overdrive channels with a great gain range and a fantastic small and rather attractive casing if I do say so myself... What made me settle on this pedal is that you can get a great range of overdrive tones from it. At low settings you can get a really nice treble booster kind of sound but by winding it up to half way you are already in thick overdrive territory. Once you get past the half way mark the signal really starts to break up and you get a really thick and creamy distortion that borders on the edge of a big muff fuzz sound but still retains enough clarity to cut through the mix. The level control is very sensible and stays within usable parameters rather than being far too quiet or too loud, what I really liked it when you wind the volume up all the way instead of being deafeningly loud it pushes the amp harder giving you a natural compression and really thick sustain! The EQ too is very usable and instead of operating in the extremes it works in a very musical frequency range and allows to you easily sweep from dark rhythm sounds through to cut like a knife lead!

I'm using it by setting the first channel with the gain at around 11 o'clock for chord work and the second channel with the volume and tone a little higher and the gain at around 4 o'clock for a boosted lead sound.

Now that its nestled happily on my pedal board it's worth saying that honorable mentions to the new Radial Bones Texas Drive which lost our due to not having separate gain control for each channel, the Visual Sound Jekyll and Hyde which lost out to frankly looking ATROCIOUS (I'm not having tat on my pedal board)... sadly as good as the full drive was it just didn't have the gain range I was looking for!

Anyway next I think I might plump for an Ernie Ball wah as I've been looking for THAT wah sound for ages now and its the sweetest I've ever heard and I need a new tuner pedal cos mines on the blink and I keep hearing good things about the Korg pitchblack... Don't forget it's my birthday soon people!

Oh, and finally via the magic of Youtube here is a video of the Dr. Swamp in action by the lovely people at proguitarshop.com: