COLORSOUND OVERDRIVE

In 1965, British electronics guru Gary Hurst began the UK fuzz pedal phenomenon with the building of the Sola Sound Tone Bender. This pedal, the MKI, was an advance of the Maestro FZ-1 and ran off 9V to give more sustain and output volume. These pedals provided the tone for guitar gods Pete Townsend, Mick Ronson,The Beatles and Jeff Beck. Further iterations of the Tone Bender (MK1.5 and MKII) are highly collectable units these days as that sound has been immortalised by Jimmy Page and that guitar tone captured on Led Zeppelin records.

Colorsound are a company that recreate some of the pedals that Sola Sound introduced in the golden era of rock and roll. These include some of the Sola Sound wahs, fuzzes and different versions of each. I got this Colorsound Overdriver Boost pedal from local Sydney muso Jeff Burch, who plays with a number of bands like Songs and The Mandala Trap. The Overdriver is a silicon transistor based pedal (whereas the Tone Benders were germanium based) that has a really usable Bass/Treble tone stack and a Drive control that lets you dial in the amount of gain you would like. The last turn of the Drive knob gives a nice bit of growl while retaining articulation and response.

He really liked the pedal but lack of LED and 9V DC jack limited its functionality on his board. So I added a yellow superbright LED with chrome bezel, true bypassed the sucker and added a DC jack.

C.