Washburn Blues Overdrive

How do you make it sound good? Kind of tough. Pretty limited pedal in my opinion. The controls are basic (level, gain, treble, bass). Simple in concept but difficult in practice

Current setup: Peavey JF-2 (semi-hollowbody resembling an ES335) equipped with Bill Lawrence L560's. She's built to resist feedback and hum. My amp is a Peavey Classic 30.

The pedal makes whitenoise on nearly all settings when used to overdrive an overdriven amp. Turning the gain knob up on an overdriven amp creates static and feedback. The critter eats your mid range and bass signal if not setup properly. When ran through the clean channel, the static is present but it is not so loud and laced with feedback. When cranked to max (sans treble and bass controls) this pedal can get kind of crunchy but it still eats your mid range and bass when gained up. Personally, I use it as a clean boost to get a mild breakup. When the gain is at 25% and below it passes off as a fairly nice clean boost and the lows won't get sucked away when the gain is set low. ALWAYS max out the level on this thing if you want to hear it.

It IS true bypass and you can tell when you signal's low range is vacuumed away during pedal engagement.

Overall, I'd recommend this as a clean boost/very light overdrive if you're on a budget. I would NEVER recommend this for overdriving an overdriven amp or attempting to get any form of distortion beyond light breakup. 5 for doing something it's intended to do.

It's built like an MXR stomper. I don't envision any problems with it. I'd gig without backup because the effect is subtle the way I use it.

Never chatted.

I play anything that can rock, mostly lead. I've played for five years and have owned a few modeling amps and electric guitars until I met my classic rock core. If I lost this pedal I'd go find something better. I like how it's a mild overdrive/clean boost of decent quality for a good price. I hate the fact it's thin, brittle and ear piercing when used on any sound that's not remotely clean. Favorite feature is what I use it for (clean boost). I compared it to other pedals I use to overdrive my drive channel on my tube amp and it's terrible. I wish this thing had a simple tone control instead of the broken treble and bass controls (and this problem isn't exclusive, another reviewer noticed it too). It's fun to have the clickable light overdrive sound and I'd recommend the pedal for this effect. Anything else is a no.

Easy to use - Volume and Gain are large knobs; treble and bass are smaller trimmer-type knobs. Footswitch has LED.
Diddling with the four controls yields a wide variety of tones.
I found it easy to get good sounds out of it. It has an endearing raunchiness to it with some breakup in the higher gain settings.

Noise level, average for an overdrive.
I'd say it is slightly better-sounding with humbucking pickups IMO but certainly usable with either.
It has plenty of volume and gain - sustain is fine for soloing with average compression. It cleans up with your guitar's volume knob and tone controls are more active.
Fine for blues, classic rock sounds, rhythm guitar work, punk rock, I doubt its great by itself for heavy metal unless to drive a distortion [works good for that]
It has more grit and crunch than a tube screamer, really though, it has its own sound. Not as polished but polish is overrated.
It is not the world's smoothest overdrive but it has character and I like it.
The full bypass is a plus.

Seems okay - switches are always an issue with me but they all suck and eventually need replaced. Only had it a few months but works AOK daily.

unknown

I've been playing rock 35 years and own loads of gear.
I have no complaints with it at all. Great value.
I would buy another one. Despite gear snobbery due to the low price, it holds its own against many overdrives at 5 times the cost and even outperforms a few of them. It works well with most tube amps and most 'warm' solid state jobs, like an Orange Crush or something like that.

It's easy to understand the controls, but NOT easy to get a good sound. The High tone knob is quite useless, even when turned all the way down it still sounds sharp...all the way up is absolutely ridiculous, it's really not useable at all. The Low tone knob barely works, I had to crank it all the way up to get anywhere close to having bass in my signal.

This pedal is cheap, and it shows. I bought another cheap overdrive pedal, Digitech's Bad Monkey. I love the sound of the Bad Monkey but it's not true bypass. When I saw this Washburn true bypass Blues Overdrive pedal with bass and treble controls, I thought it might be as good as the Bad Monkey, and it would solve my bypass problem. Well...the sound of this pedal is just plain terrible. The pedal hisses when I turn the volume knob past 9 oclock...it's a really bad hiss like white noise. The High and Low tone knobs don't work properly at all. I had to cut the high down to zero (and it still sounds like an icepick in the ear) and the Low had to be cranked all the way up just to equal the low in my bypass signal. Then there's the gain...this is a fizzy thin buzzy sounding gain. Not at all like a tweed tube amp, which is what it claims to sound like on the packaging. It's very sterile and solid-state sounding. Overall, a bad purchase. However, it is true bypass...I can assure you of that.

I don't think it's very reliable. Despite the fact that the pedal is made of metal, not plastic, I took it apart and found the most horrible soldering job I've ever seen. There was flux all over the board, the joints were messy, and not enough solder was used in some places...this is a burnout waiting to happen. The true bypass switch is actually pc board mounted, so it's possible that could fail under normal playing conditions as well. Overall, it doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy.

This pedal "might" be good if you play humbuckers that are very dark sounding and you want to brighten up your sound with a bit of fizzy overdrive. I don't know anybody in that situation, but if that's you...this is your pedal. For the other 99% of us, this pedal is useless. Also, the DC jack is on the right side of the unit which is annoying since almost every other pedal out there has the jack on the top side, so it won't fit well on most pedalboards. I am tempted to give this pedal a rating of 1, HOWEVER, because it's so darn cheap I will rate it slightly higher because you can put it in your signal chain and leave it on true bypass and consider it a "backup" in case your real overdrive pedal breaks during a gig.