Wanted to thank everyone that has reached out since launching the Light Roast Transparent Overdrive. I have had the design brewing around for quite some time, and finally brought it into the light. The design of the pedal came as a challenge to myself when the whole transparent overdrive craze became a thing. There are a lot of great drive pedals out there that do a “thing” but they just did not quite produce the sound of an amp being turned up. Many overdrives would use the typical diodes in the feedback loop with an opamp, but that tended to let some sort of clean tone with a clipped signal sitting just underneath that clean sound. Almost like mixing a clean and driven sound together. To me, this just didn’t have the feel or flavor of a tube amp being driven into clipping. So I took on the challenge of trying to capture that sound, but it had to be able to work with any amp.
Many circuit revisions (as well as scrapping the circuit several times) later, I finally came up with something that I felt captured the touch and feel of a great amp being pushed, but could also stand on its own as a gain stage. I steered away from using opamps in the circuit as I felt they were just “stiff” for what I was going for. Instead, I went with a combination of MOSFETS and transistors to do the amplifying of the guitar signal. The MOSFETs help with the touch and feel when you really dig into your guitar strings and the transistors add a little bit of the top end crunch. Overall, I am completely stoked with how the pedal turned out.
But wait!! There’s more! Yup, already have circuits in the works for the next releases. The next one coming down the pipe is capturing the sonic sound of a early 50s Tweed Super, a completely new spin on compression and a high gain companion to the Light Roast aka the Dark Roast. Be sure to stayed tuned here and on the socials for more!