*** First 20 orders will ship immediately. The remainder will ship by January 17 (hopefully sooner).
A few words.
It’s funny how small things can take on a life of their own.
The Del Mar Overdrive was initially released in 2014, and was an attempt
to take what I had done with the Sick As, and to then soften and smooth
the distortion while raising the maximum gain. This added greater
sustain, landing in the same kind of sonic territory as a certain green
OD pedal of much notoriety.
While my design process now involves very thorough maths and
careful checking of work, that original R&D era involved a lot of
trial and error, swapping parts and inserting or removing entire
elements of the circuit out. This resulted in a lot of happy accidents,
including the incredible amount of bass content that the Del Mar puts
out, but at times it also led to some unusual (even undesirable) sounds
as well. The Del Mar was absolutely the best pedal I was capable of
producing at the time - but once I realised I could do better, we
quietly discontinued it. The ensuing madness was as much a surprise to
me as it surely was to you.
The pedal you are looking at in 2019
is the “remaster” of that original concept. We have stayed faithful to
the overall tone of the Del Mar Overdrive, changing as little as
possible, while smoothing out some of the rough edges with a brand new
27V power supply circuit. If you ever struggled with particular settings
on the Del Mar, I’m pleased to say that we’ve fixed them. If you never
found issue with the original, then please enjoy the same great concept
with slight improvements - and at a fair price.
A little more.
As previously mentioned, the Del Mar was an attempt to apply what I
had learned developing the Sick As Overdrive, with the goal of
achieving softer, smoother classic overdrive sounds. Let me be blunt
though: it wasn't, and still isn't, a Tubescreamer or a Bluesbreaker
circuit - no matter how often that idea is repeated online. Instead, it
attempts to honour my favourite things about those circuits. Though I
had hoped the circuit would just speak for itself, I've no doubt now
that a lack of clarity on my end has lead to this message-board
rumour-mongering. Nevertheless I have gotten much better at describing
my circuits over the years, so hopefully this will help to clear things
up.
Both of those aforementioned pedals use a
method of distortion called "soft-clipping", and the Del Mar also takes
this approach - as do dozens of other OD pedals, to varying degrees of
success. What I always enjoyed about the best soft-clipping circuits was
the softer, smoother distortion. It allows you to mainly hear "break
up" on the wound strings of the guitar, while the first 3 strings just
get thicker and more sustained. The Bluesbreaker reference makes sense
in regard to the threshold at which the note begins to distort –with the
Del Mar's toggle down, the threshold for the note to distort is twice
as high as when the toggle is up. This results in louder output, and a
more natural sounding breakup. This is also one of the primary
differences between a Tubescreamer and a Bluesbreaker.
The tone
controls are also completely different from those pedals too, as I opted
instead for an active two-band Baxandall EQ. This gives you the ability
to boost or cut both bass and treble individually, providing you with
broad and dynamic control over your tone. With our new 27V circuit
design, this EQ sounds more powerful and articulate than ever before.
Features:
- Clean Boost, Overdrive, or a blend of the two.
- Dynamic and natural, responsive to your pick attack or volume knob.
- Internally boosted to 27 volts for maximum headroom and clarity.
- Toggle switch, controlling the amount of headroom and character of the drive.
- Powerful active tonestack, capable of 15dB of boost or cut
- Soft touch buffered bypass switching
- Current Consumption 100mA
