Tube Drive - Class A Overdrive
"The range of drive is perfect from warm, subtle bluesy break-up to searing lead tones" - Ed Oleszko - Queensbury
Tube Drive awarded Guitarist Choice award - December 2009 "The Tube Drive produces the sort of high quality beautifully balanced tones that pro rigs are built on." - Adrian Clarke
"There’s tons of extra volume and gain available here, with drive knob moving effortlessly from light, crunchy drive sounds through to full-on creamy distortion. Perhaps our favourite sounds are to be found somewhere in the middle, where you’ll find an immensely satisfying classic rock-style overdrive that’s rich with harmonics." - David Greeves
The Tube Drive is a pure tube overdrive pedal featuring three vacuum tubes for a larger-than-life, "hot-rodded" amp tone. It's tone quality is musical, organic and sounds distinctly different to pushing an amp with a solid-state booster or hybrid transistor/tube overdrive pedal. The drive knob simultaneously controls clipping over 4 cascaded gain stages so the pedal responds empathically to pick attack with a smooth and graceful breakup characteristic. At lower drive settings this pedal produces an expressive warm blues tone and increasing the drive introduces rich and musical harmonic overtones without masking the the natural sound of your guitar and amplifier.
Features
- All Tube gain circuitry: The Tube Drive is the only pedal you can buy that has a complete tube guitar preamp inside - 100% analog, class-A, all-tube means no silicon in the signal path. This topology gives the Tube Drive fine control over a wide range of gain characteristics from mild breakup to creamy saturation.
- Tube swapping: The tone and gain characteristics of the Tube Drive can be drastically altered by interchanging tubes - in fact the pedal was designed for easy access to the tubes for this purpose. It can be quickly and easily transformed into a hi-gain distortion beast, mellow blues driver or boost pedal by simply removing a tube and replacing it with a different type.
- Bax-Stack "active" tube tone control: The Tube Drive is the only overdrive with an active tube tone control. The Bax-Stack is a real treble boost (and cut) circuit with zero insertion loss, unlike passive tone stacks which can only remove frequency content ("tone-sucking"). The tone range is optimized to work over important frequencies essential for mellow jazz tones to some serious crunch.
- Low-end coutour switch: Active low boost for a warmer, richer sound. Especially useful with single coil pickups to thicken the sound or when playing at low volumes to compensate for loudness.
- Daylight visible orange L.E.D.: Indicates when pedal is engaged.
Customer Comments
"I bought the tube drive a few months ago and really, REALLY enjoy your product. I use it (believe or not) to round off the sound of my jazz box through a Roland amp. Your product is of great utility and quality! The option to change out the tubes (valves) easily is brilliant!" Craig H. Winn II - U.S.A. - May 2010
"I'm enjoying my new tube drive alot - great pedal. I play it with an old Marshall superlead and I get a really huge tone." Joe DiFonzo - U.S.A. - May 2010
"I just wanted to say that I really enjoying using my Tube Drive that I bought recently! It is the real real thing. I have just ordered a Tube-Vibe and am looking forward to playing with that as well." Sharky Modak - May 2010
"I played my first gig with the Tube Drive last night. I cannot believe how great it sounds. I got so many complements on the sound of my guitars - fantastic pedal. Well done and thanks." Jon Proudfoot - England - May 2010
"Hi Phil, I love the Tube Drive - unlimited possibilities for tone in this thing. I'm constantly trying different tube combinations and finding something new every time. Great piece of gear. Thanks!" Darren Bierman - Apr 2010
" . . . I simply can't believe the enourmous amount of variety this piece of equipment adds to the already versatile combination '57 Strat and '65 Deluxe....wow !! I'm blown away here and so is the wallpaper!! I would also like to thank The Effectrode Team for being very pleasant to deal with, which really counts for a down to earth guy like myself." Vincent Buuron - France - Mar 2010
"Phil, I got my Tube Drive today just in time to take it to a rehearsal. The lead tech guy there who runs sound (and has a great ear for tone) and myself were like two kids in a candy store man that Tube Drive is awesome dude. I cant believe how warm and just generally pleasing to the ear it makes lead guitar sound, even at high gain settings there does not seem to be any setting where you get that ice pick in your ear drum feeling." Vince Grattan - USA - Mar 2010
"Just received my Effectrode Tube Drive today. I am very impressed. When comparing it to my F***tone drive pedal the Tube Drive sounds more open and rich and doesn't squash my tone." John Cunningham - USA - Mar 2010
"Okay you guys win, everyone else should just go home now. My Tube Drive arrived this morning and my world has changed. Years of searching, and playing and trying to get the sound I wanted and this morning it came to my house and asked to come inside. Even after putting the guitar down and walking away, the joy has not subsided, and lasted most of the day." Royden - New Zealand - Mar 2010
"Being an engineer myself I know a good piece of engineering when I see one, and yours are a good example of a perfect balance between engineering and vibe!" Ricardo - Spain - Feb 2010
"Hello Phil, just a note to say thankyou for sending me the 2 Tubes, I actually do prefer lower MU tubes in the Tube Drive, it is a great sounding Pedal. I am loving all 4 of my Effectrode pedals, all have Excellent Fidelity, Tone and of course Great effects sounds." Albert Molinaro - USA - Feb 2010
"What a great pedal your Tube Drive is - the best I ever played with." Egwin Ponette (Dogwalker) - Belgium - Jan 2010
"I just became a proud owner of the Tube Drive and I must say that this is by far the best pedal I have ever come across, and it will become part of my rig." Joris de Ceuster (Dogwalker) - Belgium - January 2010
"Last Tuesday I received my Tube Drive pedal and I only can say one thing - It´s great. It doesn´t matter with a Les Paul or a Telecaster, is the best sound I´ve ever heard. Thanks" Juan - Spain - Jan 2010
"I've had this Tube Drive for a month now and it is definitely the 'tone' that I have been looking for. I took it over to the guy who I am learning to play with Gordon Wride who is a professional musician and he is a quite hard-nosed character,and he was really impressed with what it can do, he played it through his Fender amp and the difference with the Tube Drive connected was quite impressive." Hugh Mcgraa - Wales, UK - December 2009
"I play a pedal steel guitar and have a tube drive pedal. It is the best pedal I have ever played through. Please tell me when your new compression pedal will be out? If it is half as good as the Tube Drive it will blow everything else away!!!!!!!!!!" George Crickmore - USA - November 2009
"I was loving some of the tones achieved - it sounded great with a Strat. It's now pride of place on the pedal board - which is always a declaration of intent on my behalf - It's very easy to get some really classic sounds through my Fender with i.e. I really like it!!" Pete Mortimer - Cranes Music Shop - UK
"Amazingly warm, clear, articulate drive. The range of tone is excellent, yet all settings are very usable, the range of drive is perfect from warm, subtle bluesy break-up to searing lead tones, all whilst being very dynamic and cleaning up from the guitar volume control." Ed Oleszko - Queensbury - UK
"You can get different styles of signal distortion as you add or reduce a gain knob - You can go from a slightly pushed amp to overdrive - to more overdrive - to fuzz-like overdrive - to very deep, angry Gary Moore's style distortion- this is a unique feature - I have never met such an option in other pedals I tried! Fantastic! And you managed to produce a drive that changes it's character! This was very surprising for me - I have never expected to get such a pedal." Ilia Boussen - Russia
"I just plugged the Tube-Drive in to hear it and all I can say is WOW! This pedal rocks! You get Unity Gain at about “1”! The pedal is a beast. It sounds great no matter where you set the Tone control, and it doesn’t seem to get ice pick trebly tones if you set it high. The distortion is very amp-like, it doesn’t sound so much like a pedal. In other words, it sounds like you’re playing your amp with your guitar. It’s very rich. I have to say, I like it better than most distortion pedals I’ve heard and I’m not sure what I would say I like better. Love it!" Gary Rosen - Guitar X - U.S.A.
"I love how the Drive knob sweeps from Overdrive thru Distortion and into the Fuzz realm - different & useful throughout the whole range - adds a lot of versatility!" Joey Backenstoe
"I received the Tube Drive today and had to play it for an hour, and then couldn't stop. One word - wow! I have never bonded so quickly with a pedal. This pedal does everything from a slight hairy blues to being an absolute roaring mutant beast. I shouldn't even call it a pedal since it acts like an amp (it cleans up beautifully with the guitar's volume knob and has very amplike dynamics) and it sounds like an amp (it has loads of full thick distortion with a bit of sag). Maybe they should call it a mini tube amp?" Solomon Abuliak - U.S.A.
