5 super underrated overdrives for under $100: NUX vs Tone City vs TC Electronic vs Caline vs EHX

Today, we’re comparing five of the cheapest and most underrated overdrive pedals in my collection: the NUX ‘6ixty5ive OD, the Tone City Durple, the tc Electronic Cinders, the Caline Queen Bee and the Electro Harmonix Crayon 69 Full-Range Overdrive!

EHX Crayon: https://thmn.to/thoprod/376576?offid=...
tc Electronic Cinders: https://thmn.to/thoprod/400120?offid=...
NUX ‘6ixty5ive here: https://www.nuxefx.com/6ixty5iveod.html
Tone City Durple: https://www.andertons.co.uk/tone-city...
Caline Queen Bee: Get this one on your local Amazon!

These five pedals are some of my favorites when it comes to overdrive, and yet I feel like all of them are distinctly under the radar with many guitar players, even though they’re all on the right side of affordable – so it’s time to change that by comparing the five with some good old knob tweaking!

The NUX ‘6ixty5ive is the newest of these pedals, and it’s fantastic: it’s an homage to the legendary Paul Cochrane Timmy and the Vemuram Jan Rey, so it does transparent drive in spades.

The Tone City Durple is a signature pedal for Danish Pete Honoré of Andertons fame. It’s a modded version of the Tones City Mandragora, which itself is based on the Lovepedal Kalamazoo model, which is a boutique overdrive that goes from smooth crunch to quite a lot of gnarly dirt when you crank it!

And talking of gnarly, the tc Cinders is based on the iconic Boss Blues Driver pedal, and simulates a roaring tube amp.

The Caline Queen Bee is perhaps the dark horse of the bunch, and this one – like the much-loved Joyo Sweet Baby, which I also own – is a crunchy delight, based on the Mad Professor Sweet Honey Overdrive.

Finally, the EHX Crayon – the most expensive of the bunch at around $80, is said to be based on the Xotic BB Preamp pedal, which is a Marshall/Bluesbreaker-flavored stompbox.

All in all then, what we have here are five budget overdrives that won’t break the bank, but will certainly take your tone to the next level! All you need to do is listen in and see which one(s) sound best to your ears. In the video, I run the five pedals through an indie rock loop played on the bridge single coil pickup of my Fender Telecaster, then a classic rock loop using the bridge humbucker of my Epiphone Les Paul. The pedals are running into my Hughes & Kettner AmpMan Classic on the clean channel, with no reverb.

Which one do you think sounds best?

Here are some links to the various parts of the video:

00:00 Introduction and what we’re doing today
00:30 NUX ‘6ixty5ive info
01:37 Tone City Durple info
02:37 tc Electronic Cinders info
03:11 Caline Queen Bee info
04:02 EHX Crayon info
05:37 Today’s rig and plan

06:56 Fender Telecaster indie rock loop
18:12 Epiphone Les Paul classic rock loop

My setup was as follows: I ran the five pedals into the front end of my Hughes & Kettner AmpMan Classic pedal amp, then went from the Red Box DI straight into my Focusrite Scarlett 2i4, which went into Logic Pro X. That’s it. No post-processing on the sounds was done. Oh, and I used my Boss RC-10R to record and play the loops. Here’s some links to those bits of gear:

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Hughes & Kettner AmpMan Classic: https://thmn.to/thoprod/512777?offid=...
Boss RC-10R: https://thmn.to/thoprod/470055?offid=...
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Enjoy!


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Backing music from the YouTube Audio Library: Duck In The Alley – TrackTribe.

#OverdrivePedal #TransparentOverdrive #NUXpedals #tcelectronic #ToneCity #Caline #CalinePedals #EHX #ElectroHarmonix

Note: certain links in the description are affiliate links. If you click said links and purchase anything as a result, I will receive a small commission. This doesn’t cost you anything extra, but it does help to support the channel. So, if you do that, thank you very much!

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