Akai G-Drive

Very easy to use once you realize which set of EQ sliders is post and pre! Just dial in the amount of distortion, play with pre and post and you will find a number of GREAT sounds at your fingertips

You can get such a wide variety of distortion tones it is beyond explanation. This is the absolutely perfect pedal for anyone who wants to tweak and get a very unique and personal distortion. At extreme settings the EQ sounds a bit wonky, but at lower settings the range of possibilities is staggering. I really cannot understand why this pedal is not more well know and sought after!

seems to be built extremely well, I would expect it hold up as good or better than other metal stompboxes

NA

Overall an excellent pedal. I hightly recommend this for anyone who wants to tweak out their own distortion and feels like the run of mill fuzzes, overdrives, 808's, etc are nothing special. This ideal to dial in a secret weapon tone and kick it in for special solos or musical sections. In the studio it seems like it would be like having a wide range of pedals to chooose from all in one

This pedal is quite easy to use, but think about having an EQ pedal , a distortion unit and then another EQ in series, not just a single pedal. This means that there are lots of possibilities and lots of different sounds... you can go from a Big Muff to a Tube Screamer, so even being an easy pedal, you have to know how this works.

The manual is really self-explanatory if you need to read it.

LP Studio/SRV signature > Wah Clyde MCoy > Akai Gdrive > Twin Reverb.

I play mostly old stuff, like Hendrix, Robin Trower, Cream, The who, SRV... This pedal really is a Godsend... I just don't need nothing more to reproduce QUALITY tones, no matter if we're talking about Fuzz, Overdrives, Distortions, Boosters...you name it. I don't understand why this little boy remains unknown. I used to have lots of stompboxes (Fuzz Factory, TS808, Dallas Treble Boost, Boss DS1 and a ProCo Rat) but now, when it comes to do any gig I pick the GDrive and just change the settings between songs. Great touch responsiveness, you can change the tone drastically with your guitar's volume knob, wich I discovered by accident (I don't use that feature).

Sounds great for me, but I don't know if it can do the job for a Metal Zone. It has a preset for Metal-like sounds, but I can't tell if this is good or bad...(I don't play that style, either).

The sturdiest stompbox I've ever seen. Military Specs. You can hit the road without a backup. Also quite heavy!

I don't know... never dealt with akai....

I've been playing since I was 14, I'm 28 right now. I feel like I don't need to change nothing in my rig anymore. If it was stolen (sure not lost!) I'd inmediately go to search it anywhere, because they are indiscontinued and I don't want to carry no more pedals again. I got them in a really little case, that's all I need, no more batteries, no more than ONE adapter... If you happen to find one, go and buy it, you won't regret.

The rear of the unit contains the input, output and DC IN sockets. The top has two large knobs, one for drive and one for output. Then there are two sets of six eq sliders, one for pre-distortion and one for post-distortion. There is also a footswitch.

Everything about the unit is easy to use. The sliders move smoothly and most things are sufficiently spaced so as not to feel cramped or be fiddly to use. Two things I would've done:

Make it more clear which eq set was which. They are labelled color and character, but I would've preferred pre- and post- designations.

Move the output and drive knobs slightly to the left. The metal bars on the front (which protect the sliders in case of a drop) can get in the way of turning the knobs if you don't grip them in a particular manner.

Getting a good sound out of the unit is as simple as plugging it in and lining the sliders up with one of the presets. Then small adjustments can djust the sound to what you require.

One point that was brought up on a forum I visited was that there was a delay (of nearly a second) between pressing the footswitch and the effect coming in, rendering the pedal unusable. All I can say to this is that they must have had a defective unit. It is hard to tell, but I think there is a very very slight delay in kicking the effect in, but none on bypassing it. If this delay is present it's immeasurable to me and certainly doesn't effect verse-chorus changes.

Of course this unit is not nearly as simple to use as something like a DS1, but it isn't simply a distortion unit. The ease of use rating is based more on comparing it with EQ units, and in this respect it scores highly.

I play an Ibanez RGR220DX into either a Marshall AVT20 or a Kustom 10W practice amp. This pedal sounds awesome through both, but really comes to life when put through the Marshall.

First point of note is that this is an Analog Distortion pedal with a true bypass footswitch. A number of people seem to believe this is a digital unit and therefor not worth getting. This is not true!! It is analog (if you don't believe me, read the manual!).

The EQ sliders really do allow you to dial in pretty much any sound you like. This unit is so incredibly versatile. Does is make me sound like EVH? No, of course it doesn't. It can however be tweaked to sound very similar to many other distortion pedals, including the rat, TS9, DS1 etc. What it doesn't do is make it sound like I'm playing a TS9 into a Marshall stack, though I have no doubt it would if I owned a Marshall stack!

In short, the sound of this unit is excellent in every style you want to get out of it. Of course you can totally ruin your sound if you really mess around with the sliders, but don't go over the top and you are guaranteed to be pleased. It gets a 9 because no pedals perfect and until I've tried it through a big stack and with some other guitars I wont know how well it responds in different setups.

It is as solid a pedal as I have ever come across. The footswitch is study and responsive, and all the sliders slide with just the right amount of resistance. The two plastic knobs are the only real let down here, they just don't feel as sturdy as the rest of the unit.

I have no doubt it will keep working at 100% for decades but I would never gig with it without a backup. That's just asking for trouble and I wouldn't rely that much on any pedal.

I have been playing nearly 3 years, but not intensively. I play a massive variety of music and this pedal has proved suitable for pretty much all of them. I would definately replace it if someone stole it (although it's discontinued so once all stock is sold I might have trouble replacing it).

I love the sound and the shear versatility of the unit. I hate the fact I haven't yet got an adapter for it because it eats batteries. I'm playing a lot more now I have this unit because it's so much more enjoyable to play when it sounds this good.

Try it, you wont be disappointed. I can see this being a much sought after pedal in ten years time.

The G-Drive is very self explanatory if you like things to be graphical. With two sliding sets of 7-band eq's one can set the gain on each tone band of the signal going into the drive circuit and then tweak the same tone bands coming out. So one could set low gain for the bass, for instance, and hi gain for the treble, so the treble is clipped more, but then bring the bass back up for the final output.
This is easy to use - even for guitarists, despite the opinion of one reviewer here - but nonetheless has more or less infinite scope for developing one's sound. Initially it's easy to look for the extreme sounds, which are helpfully indicated on the pedal, but the unit is flexible enough that it can become a tone laboratory in which one might learn and refine a sense of exactly what makes up the "killer tone" of one's dreams.
The fact that it is a manual unit without presets, in this age of digital pedals, is something which is noticeable. I may make a series of cardboard templates to "remember" my settings with - a sort of neolithic version of programmable memory settings.

The pedal is noisy on extremely hi gain settings, i.e. when one ups the gain going in *and* out of the unit, but after one gets over trying out its more extreme sounds, it's perfectly quiet on the settings that are useable.
On many boutique pedals one would not have this choice, because the manufacturer wants them to sound smooth and clean, on the G-Drive the choice is left to the user. For anyone playing noisy metal styles, there'll be enough noise around to shield this on the most extreme settings, but for someone looking for a softer blues overdrive, the joy is that the G-Drive is capable of this too.
I think the pleasure in this pedal will turn out to be, for me, working with the more subtle sounds and coming to understand exactly what constitutes the tones I like.
May main niggle with the G-Drive, apart from its weight and relative bulk, which is unavoidable with that many sliders on board, is that there's no effects in/out loop. One wouldn't normally expect one on a pedal like this, but the facility that the two eq systems offer is simply winderful, and it would be very nice to be able to use it as a pre-emphasis and post pre-amp tone for a decent valve amp, instead of for a solid state overdrive circuit. If there were an effects send after the first set of sliders that could be sent directly to my amp, and then the return could be taken from the effects send of the amp, and then sent back to the return of the amp after the second set of sliders, it would mean that the manufacturer's settings on any valve amp could be overridden.
I was planning on doing this until I saw the G-drive, which was cheaper than a single 7-band eq pedal!

Seems like a rock solid box, and there are steel bars to protect the sliders. I guess one could break it of one tried, but it would have to be deliberate.

No idea

The G-Drive, for me, is a dream come true. I was going to set something like this up anyway, and had never seen it all in one pedal before. A totally flexible tone laboratory that will keep the price of hunting for that holy grail of perfct tone down to affordable levels.

very straight foward if you understand EQ.

great ! this thing sounds clean and perfect.... or sick and distorted if that's your taste. the most flexible pedal ever! I just grabbed a second one for stereo action. These are truly insane. Great with all sorts of audio toys not just for guitars. This thing made 17 tacos for me in the course of an hour, then it dished out a Slurpee it must've grabbed from the 7-11 while it was on break then it kicked right back into shredding out the sounds i felt were needed. It just does whatever you want. Then brought a damn super burrito, bless it's Japn made soul.

well, i think it's fine just ultra-picky about batteries. Didn't even work with the battery that shipped with it. This is a big pedal..... so beware, I'm not a big fan of power supplies with pedals that take batteries... and the PS I tried with this just made it hum... so beware... it requires the "right" batt to live. Other than that it's a tank.. you could be a serial killer with this box as your weapon and you could still use it for a song about the kills.

nope.

nothing else like it! amazing deal!

This is complex for a kid but for a tweaker it's a delight.
You have two equalizers, one before the distortion and one after.
Believe it or not kids, this is basically how distortion boxes are designed but here you are the engineer.

This unit will give a tremendous variety of tones. Almost limitless. Other units do not have this scope of variation and are "preset units" compared to this. If universities had "Distortion 101" classes this would be the perfect lab unit. A 60's fuzz is made by going heavy on the bass on the first eq and then going heavy on the treble on the 2nd eq.
For Van Halen to modern sounds you do just the opposite, you cut bass
before the distortion and then boost the bass after.

This looks as if it cost $500. and was made for a hospital or something. Hell, it has rubber feet big enough for an amp!

I think this product is discontinued so get one from the friend fast.

A very unique product. If you collect distortion pedals like I do then this one will do the best job of imitating all the others.

It's very straightforward to use: drive, output level, pre-EQ sliders, post-EQ sliders. Not much to the manual, just some suggested settings.

Knowing *how* to use the twin EQ is another thing altogether. You really need to know how EQ works to get the most out of this pedal, and most guitarists can't figure out how to use a single parametric EQ, let alone the difference between pre and post-gain. So this pedal is not for most people. But if you know what you're doing, you can get *exactly* the distortion tone you want.

I usually use it for bass; most bass distortions either 1) suck all your bass out 2) have way too much gain to be playable or 3) sound like poo. Not the G-Drive: I dialed it in so when I stomp the switch my bass sounds *exactly* like normal, except crunchier. Priceless!

I've also found some great guitar tones: raunchy fuzz, loud ratty thrash, an amazing Fender emulation, and more. Hint: keep a notepad ready and WRITE DOWN YOUR SETTINGS or you will never remember how you got that killer tone.

Only used it for a couple of weeks but it's all metal and very solid looking. The EQ sliders are protected by two huge metal rails. Seems very robust but I can't guarantee that.

Haven't needed any yet.

I mostly play hard rock and punk, and have played guitar and bass for over ten years. If it were stolen I'd buy another one right away because I can get so many tones out of it and it's the best bass distortion I've ever used. The only stomp box I've been unable to get a reasonable emulation of with it is the Tech 21 XXL.

The only thing I wish I could do is save patches, but it's all analog so that won't happen.

Once again, most guitarists will just be confused, because there are hundreds of great sounds here, but thousands of terrible ones. If you're willing to learn and spend the time, you can find the great ones and have a blast with it. I'm tempted to buy several just so I can leave them on my favorite settings!

Thanks, Akai.

Really nothing hard about its use. There is a drive knob to set the amount of overdrive, a volume knob to adjust the output volume, and two sets of equalizing sliders to shape the input and output signals. A 10 rating means a pedal plugs itself in, sets its own controls, turns on your amp for you, and makes you coffee, so this one gets only a 9.

The two sets of equalizers make this pedal head and shoulders above all other overdrive pedals. YOU determine how your pedal sounds, not the manufacturer. Maybe there are some of you who do not want this responsibility, but virtually any other pedal's sound can be replicated by setting the two equalizers. Because no pedal's sound is a perfect 10, this one rates a 9.

It's too early to give a rating for reliability, but I can tell you that the exterior is built as solidly as any stompbox ever made. I cannot imagine anyone being able to fault its physical construction.

Haven't had the need to contact Akai.

As I said earlier, you have total control over how this pedal sounds. I am not aware of any other overdrive pedal that gives you this much control. Can you handle this much flexibility? If you are too lazy to fiddle with the two sets of equalizer sliders, Akai has marked next to the sliders some suggested settings to get you near the kind of sound you are looking for. Blues, fuzz, metal -- they all marked for you. I imagine that once you become familiar with the G-Drive you are not likely to need another overdrive pedal ever. Again, no pedal rates perfect, so this one gets the next one down.

Very easy to use, but it was not obvious that the bottom EQ was pre-distortion and the top EQ was post-distortion.

While akai isn't marketing it this way this is the first analog modeling distortion pedal. You can make it sound like your favorite distortion box, or invent your own creations. You have the ability to take the input section of a Fuzz pedal (low-pass filter) and match it with the output section of a Overdrive pedal. The possibilities are endless. Both the Pre and Post EQ sections have the same filter frequencies. I measured them on a Spectrum Analyzer and they are: 125Hz, 225Hz, 500Hz, 1kHz, 2kHz, and 4Khz. (Yes I know I am a geek, thank you very much).

Built to Japanese Military Spec.

Haven't dealt with akai.

For $89 you get 2 graphic EQs and a distortion box. There isn't anything like this and probably never will be again. It is too keyboard-y to appeal to the typical un-adventurous guitar player. None-the-less I am having a really good time with it. You may not be able to dial in the perfect TS-808 clone, but you can get close, and you can modify it any way you'd like with out soldering.