This year, MXR is releasing its own take—dubbed the Sugar Drive—on a rare, beloved circuit from the '90s. Packed into a pedalboard-friendly mini chassis, the pedal provides a wide range of tones, from driving boost to lush overdrive.
The pedal's interface is clean, with only three knob controls—Tone, Drive, and Volume—and an on/off footswitch on its face. Despite its simplistic aesthetic, the pedal's finely tuned circuitry is a bit more dynamic than it appears.
Instead of a Drive knob that simply increases the pedal's intensity, it actually grabs your clean, unaffected signal and blends it with the overdrive as you turn the knob. Then, the pedal's "Charge Pump" increases headroom by increasing the operating voltage. This makes for a deeper, more progressive move from clean tone to affected dirty tone and allows your sound to open up more naturally.
On the side of the chassis, you'll find a selectable switch and corresponding LED indicator for choosing between true bypass or MXR's buffered bypass. Check out the video above for a closer look, and click the banner below for more content from NAMM 2018.