The MIDI Overdrives thread

[laxu]

I've owned a Kernom Ridge for the past 18 months. All analogue, every knob controllable using MIDI, 128 presets, clean boost, soft clip, hard clip. Takes an expression pedal directly or CC commands from your MIDI controller. It was the only drive on my "band" board. I think it does an awful lot and does it well. I recently tried a Brothers and liked it, but still preferred the Ridge, so sold it on.

That seems like a cool, but annoyingly large pedal. Maybe that's fine if it replaces e.g 3-4 drive pedals, but it's almost as big as my Strymon Volante.

 

[Desertdweller]

As I put in my original post on this thread, I did wind up trying out all three of these ODs, the Boss OD200, the Lady Luck, and the Strymon Sunset. I think they’re all excellent and I have more detailed thoughts below.

The Lady Luck was the most interesting, but also the lowest tech. I had to hook it up with an old PS3 controller USB to my computer to edit on it, since it was designed to be hooked up to a PC or a phone with a headphone jack and Source Audio has not updated / modernized this pedal yet. Once i could edit it, I loved this pedal because I could program 3 sounds into it that all fit what I liked. I was able to get a dual overdrive to sound close to a TC Integrated Preamp, and I was able to get a solid Tubescreamer sound out of it along with a Mesa Tone Burst style sparkle drive. If they release a new modernized one, I’m the first in line.

The Strymon was absolutely great and I loved the onboard gate. But I had to go into the manual card all the time to remember how to edit on it as it’s really not intuitive. Also the Strymon did something wonky to the bottom end of the signal through a rectifier amp, hard to pick up on phone audio but it definitely had an unusual and unpleasant warble in the room. I eventually punted on this pedal, though YMMV for sure.

The Boss pedal is awesome as well, but I didn’t see any difference between the ODs on it and what you get with the MS3 or the GT1000Core. Either of those devices is not much more $ and you get much more flexibility from them, so my recommendation would be to go with one of those since they’re a little easier to dial in and do so much more. But the OD200 is still really good.

At time time, on one board I have a few analog ODs, and then my other board is a VP4, which has all the fractal ODs in it and really that’s an endgame type of unit, especially considering how absolutely awesome fractal overdrives are.

 

[TheBigDipper]

That seems like a cool, but annoyingly large pedal. Maybe that's fine if it replaces e.g 3-4 drive pedals, but it's almost as big as my Strymon Volante.

Sure. I did, in fact, use it to replace 2 overdrives and a boost. It's good, but won't stack drives, unlike some others available.

 

[Boudoir Guitar]

I've owned a Kernom Ridge for the past 18 months. All analogue, every knob controllable using MIDI, 128 presets, clean boost, soft clip, hard clip. Takes an expression pedal directly or CC commands from your MIDI controller. It was the only drive on my "band" board. I think it does an awful lot and does it well. I recently tried a Brothers and liked it, but still preferred the Ridge, so sold it on.

That looks killer. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.