NPD: Crazy Tube Circuits Ziggy dual overdrive

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You don't hear much about these pedals so I thought I'd do a bit of a write up.

Got this one as a bit of an experiment, because I wanted to switch between clean, light crunch, and distortion for playing live, with only limited pedal board space available.

It's designed as two separate overdrive circuits, one high gain and one low gain, and you can switch between them (but not stack them, only one on at a time).

The settings definitely take a bit of getting used to! Even though each channel has just 'volume', 'Tone', and 'gain' (pretty standard) they work in an unusual way. The Gain control is actually also a tone control, giving you more bass/mids as you turn it up. The actual Tone control is more like treble or presence. 

Consequently when I initially turned it on (having left the manual safely unread in the box) I set the gain about 9 O'clock, tone about 11, and volume to match the clean level (which is what I would do on a Boss overdrive for example). This created a horrible trebly icepick tone. I was using a tele and a vox amp which probably didn't help. Awful sound.

It turns out that you have to kind of set the gain according to how much bass/mids you want, then bring up the volume. If you make it slightly too dark and then you can correct that using the Tone control. Once I got my head around that, I found you can get some very good sounds out of it. The low gain can be set to just give a light grit and fatten the sound up. The high gain can do mid heavy/Marshall type lead tones very well.

It's a slightly odd pedal, and the gain/tone knob seems a strange choice because it can make some of the gain parameter unusable depending on what your bass tone is like. That said despite the initial struggle it's actually very good once you get it dialled in, and it's very handy for me not to have to adjust the knobs mid set, basically like having presets.

I've been trying a few overdrives out recently, no doubt eventually I'll do what I normally do and try a load and then just go back to the old SD-1. All part of the fun I suppose...