Great overdrive to get many tones

The 3 Series Overdrive is a versatile low-to-mid gain soft-clipping overdrive, and it is the main dirt pedal of my practice pedalboard.

I'm quite new to guitar but I have already tried a bunch of overdrive pedals. What I found special about the 3 Series Overdrive is how its sound does not get muddy. It is possible to play chords and still get good definition when using significant gain.

In addition, it is very versatile, enabling for a wide range of usable sounds. Its simplicity makes it easy for me to know which knob to adjust in order to get closer to a particular sound. I use the pedal to get an overdrive tone that fits the type of song I'm practicing, and also to stack it with an EHX Hot Tubes when fuzz is needed.

This pedal replicates the discontinued Japanese HAO Rumble Mod boutique pedal, which was inspired by the tones of Dumble amps, which were inspired by the tone of Robben Ford using a Fender Bassman amp pushed by a Tube Screamer. So it has a connection with the Tube Screamer while being different, as JHS describes in a surrealistic way.

Other reviews indicate that the pedal sound is too bright. I'm using a Gretsch guitar with blacktop Broad'Tron humbuckers, and the brightness level of the pedal works really well for me, finding usable sounds in most of the "body" knob range. For brighter pickups, the story may be different.

The "gain" toggle provides another level of versatility: a cleaner sound with the gain toggle up (led clipping) and more compressed with the toggle down (silicon clipping).

The only minor negative considerations for me are related to volume discrepancies:

• The last 15% of the "body" knob becomes noisy, requiring to reduce the volume to fix it.
• The gain toggle has a significant difference in volume. I have adjusted my EQ pedal to compensate for the volume difference quickly.

From Gear Setup

Bright!

Although Josh Scott insists this is not a Tube Screamer, that is what it is. Not a verbatim copy, obviously, but the topology is identical, minus the buffered bypass section and with a tweaked tone control. Slightly different values also makes the mid-hump less extreme; the tone-shaping high-pass filter is centred at 605 Hz instead of 720 Hz, and the low-pass filter is well over an octave higher than a stock TS9. And you get to chose clipping type, symmetrical silicon diodes or red LEDs. The latter gives a more punchy, less compressed crunch, while the silicon mode is fuzzier and softer.

The big difference is the tone knob, called body, which increases both gain and treble. It is extremely bright, into a clean Twin Reverb (B2, M8, T4, bright off), I found everything above 9 o'clock way too bright. Into an overdriven Marshall, this is less of a problem, but the tone control is still incredibly bright. For my use, the best setting is LED clipping, body at zero and drive at 1 or 2 o'clock, level at 10–11 o'clock for approximate unity level. This makes the bass cut not too severe. Into an MXR Dist + this sounds great, like an unmuddy RAT. I wish the bass was even less cut, but the circuit uses miniature components, so modifications are not an option.

An odd thing with this pedal is its lack of headroom. Any boost pedal in front of this doesn't sound good, it just becomes muddy and super-compressed.

It's okay

I didn't really like the Body knob... Not sure what pedal this pedal is closer to, but sounds great and very versatile. You can a lot of sounds out of it, from OCD to Tube Screamer