I wouldn’t say there is one universal best overdrive pedal. The best distortion pedal depends on your tonal needs, budgets, and personal preferences. And it’s the same with any other of the guitar pedals out there. The fuzz and overdrives have a gain, volume, and filter (high-pass, low-pass, or none). But the distortion has an extra switch that goes between crunch, mild, and soaring lead tones. Buffered bypass is where the signal still passes through the pedal and its circuitry, but is boosted. This helps to strengthen the signal, and actually does more to preserve your signal than true bypass pedals. Buffered bypass pedals are especially helpful if you’re using a large signal chain (lots of pedals). Don't be fooled by the compact size of the Rowin LEF-324 Plexion pedal as it is more than tough enough to deal with some serious stage stomping when attached to any pedalboard so you can feel confident during any live performance. There are a lot of great pedals out there manufactured by some of the well known manufacturers. Some of them can be relatively expensive which means there's a big market for guitar pedal clones.

From the custom mode, you’ll still get a fairly similar tone to the standard mode, but everything is dialled up. There’s more punch, gain, and aggression. Rebrands: A rebrand is where a factory (likely Mooer or someone who has cloned Mooer) internals into a different enclose they made for another company. Not all rebrands are exactly the same, but they’re usually cloning the same pedal. There are dozens of Mooer rebrands on the market, so we’ve not listed everything we think is a rebrand of a Mooer pedal since that’d just saturate the list. Here are the pedals we suspect of being rebrands: The Walrus Audio Iron Horse V2 is a great distortion pedal. It’s based on the classic RAT pedal but offers more flexibility and improved tone. There’s also the Fender Pugilist Distortion, EQD Acapulco Gold, and Empress Effects Multidrive. What is the most versatile distortion pedal?This is a work in progress. It's certainly not complete and there's a fair bit of guess work in there. Please get in touch if you know of inexpensive clones which aren't on the list!

On bright mode, it takes on familiar tones from the 80s with tighter palm mute tones and sizzling highs.A company called DemonFX have been making quite a few clones recently. They've got the Revv G3, a few Darkglass pedals, Friedman BEOD, Origin Cali76 several KoT pedals and others. We've not included them on this list because to us they're closer to counterfeits than clones since they keep the branding almost identical. You May Also Like

The Fender Pugilist is my favorite distortion pedal from Fender’s new range of beautifully designed pedals. In fact, it is one of the best distortion pedals on the market today (in my opinion). Especially considering its feature set, price-point, build quality, and tone. While you can get reasonably close to a particular distorted sound, don't get too obsessed about getting to perfect. Unless you can invest in other important factors like amps, cables, other pedals and most important of all - playing technique. True bypass is where your guitar’s signal passes straight through a pedal unaffected. It essentially bypasses the components of the pedal to pass your signal through the next cable. A lot of guitar players prefer this because they feel like it makes their tone more transparent. However, this isn’t necessarily the case. The main effect that true bypass has is that it shortens the overall distance your signal travels before it reaches your amp. This can help your signal maintain high-end response. As the distance from your guitar to your amp increases you gradually start to lose high-end frequencies. This starts at roughly 18.5 feet, according to BOSS). However, true bypass doesn’t do anything to improve your tone.The best option depends on what you’re looking for. If you just want to plug in and get to playing, odds are you’ll be frustrated with a pedal that requires a lot of tweaking to get a good tone. Likewise, if you prefer having as much control as possible over your tone you’re going to want a pedal that will facilitate that. Most Op amp based distortion pedals are meant for plug-and-play use. But there are some with more tone shaping controls. Note that many guitar amps, including Headphone Amps, come with basic distortion effect. Some distortion units and compressors come with THD (Total Harmonic Distortion) control for more precise distortion.