Can I Get 5 Iconic Overdrive Pedals From an EQ Pedal and an OD-3?

How close did I get? I hope this video shows how useful an EQ pedal can be, as well as highlighting some of the main differences between these classic overdrive pedals.

I’m using the Boss GE-7 after the OD-3 because that way the EQ pedal has more influence on the overall sound, if I put the Boss GE-7 before the overdrive, it only adjusts the saturation and compression of each frequency band, it would still have the inherent overall sound of the OD-3. In an ideal world I'd have an EQ pedal both before and after the Boss OD-3 but I want to see how close I can get just using one EQ pedal.

Timecodes:
00:00 - Intro
00:39 - Ibanez Tube Screamer
03:16 - Klon
05:43 - Marshall Blues Breaker Pedal
07:18 - Nobels ODR-1
09:20 - Full Tone OCD

The classic Ibanez TS-9 tube screamer. I’ve put the Boss SD-1 Super Overdrive along with this just because it’s another popular overdrive pedal with a similar sound to a tube screamer. The Ibanez TS-9 and Boss SD-1 do seem a bit more compressed than the Boss OD-3 which gives a bit of a softer attack sometimes when you hit hard and lets notes ring out a bit longer. I can hear less of a difference between all the pedals when playing through an amp that's on the edge of breakup, which is how a lot of people prefer to use these more mid focused tube screamer type pedals.

The Ceriatone Centura is the Klon clone that I own so I’ll be using that to compare to here. There's a big difference in the gain settings, the Centura is a much cleaner pedal. I managed to get close to the EQ by using similar settings to the tubescreamer settings but flattening out the peak of the mid boost a little and then making a steeper drop at the edges. The Centura seems to compress in a different way, when I play lightly on the OD-3 the sound gets cleaner and drops in volume but when I play lightly on the Centura, the overdrive cleans up in a similar way but the volume of that cleaner sound seems louder and clearer than the OD-3.

The Marshall Blues Breaker pedal is one of the original amp in a box pedals. The Bluesbreaker pedal is also what a lot of other popular overdrive pedals are based on like the Analog Man King of Tone, the JHS Morning Glory and the Wampler Pantheon. The Bluesbreaker is similar to the Klon in that when you turn up the gain control it changes the EQ, mainly boosting mids. The Bluesbreaker is a bit more subtle than the tubescreamer and Klon circuits though, it’s flatter with the mid boost being mainly in the lower mids. The the difference in the saturation and distortion in the different frequency bands is quite obvious here, the Bluesbreaker pedal is much more saturated, compressed and distorted in the higher frequencies while the OD-3 seems to be much cleaner and less distorted in the high end. This is where it would be very useful to have the an EQ pedal before as well as after the OD-3 to try and get closer to the sound of the Bluesbreaker pedal.

The Nobels ODR-1 is often regarded as the Nashville overdrive sound. I love the ODR-1 for low output single coil pickup guitars like my strat where the open airy high end of the OD-3 can sound too harsh, especially when like here you use it through a Fender blackface with it’s inherent mid scoop a Jensen C12N speaker which is also known to be bright. The ODR-1 has a really big full bass response and has a nice rolled off high end to stop it sounding harsh. If like me you love the sound of the OD-3 but sometimes struggle with harshness in the high end when using single coil pickups, this is a great setting.

Not a lot actually needs to be done to get the OD-3 to sound similar to the Full Tone OCD. Just a tiny little bump at 3.2k and a slight dip at 800hz.

There are obvious limitations to this, I only tried to match one setting from each pedal, I used what I thought were probably the most commonly used settings for each pedal. So even if I did manage to get a sound which is close, remember the range and flexibility of each pedal is going to be different.