Product: Route 101 Guitars OV-1 Overdrive
Price Paid: US $30
Submitted
02/14/2001
at
09:04am
by
Bob DeGrande
Email: none
Ease of Use
:
9
Overdrive pedal - year 2000 model. Pretty standard features - level, tone, and drive controls. The manual is one sheet of paper folded over, which is enough for a pedal of this simplicity. A couple of hours of experimenting with various guitars let me get a wide variety of useful sounds.
Sound Quality
:
10
I play through a variety of solid state amps (tube amp is on its way). I use a Route 101 Solimar Custom w/Hot Rails, a Fender Strat Plus Deluxe with Red,Silver,Blue Lace Sensors, a Parker P-38 w/single coils, a humbucker, and a piezo pickup, a Strat with Gold Lace Sensors, a Lace guitar w/Holy Grails, a DeArmond JetStar w/humbuckers, and a Danelectro Hodad w/lipstick pickups.
What is amazing is how hard it is to get a bad sound out of this pedal These pickups vary widely in output level and sound, but even at the highest gain setting, notes retain their individual character. This is an overdrive pedal, NOT a distortion. Route 101, like most orher companies, makes a distortion pedal and a metal pedal if that's the sound you're looking for. This pedal at high drve settings is as much distortion as I need, but that's my style. It does not add a significant amount of noise except at very high drive settings with very low output pickups, like the Danelectro's. I have a Danelectro Pastrami overdrive, which sounded surprisingly good, but had a tendency to pick up radio stations. The Route 101 pedal does not have this problem. I know that their guitars are very well shielded - the same may be the case here.
Reliability
:
8
I'd always have a backup. This is plastic and metal and seems solidly built. I'd still regard the Boss pedals as the best for reliability, but this seems fine.
Customer Support
:
10
The best guitar company for customer service - period.
Overall Rating
:
10
I've been playing seriously for about two years, although I had played off and on as a teenager. My equipmnent is listed above. I would definitely replace this if stolen. It sounds good at almost any setting, which is rare in an overdrive or distortion pedal. The only downside to me is that the spring is fairly stong - it takes a pretty good stomp to activate it. Anyway, I don't think anyone looking for an overdrive would be disappointed with either this pedal or the company.
