Drunk Beaver Pedals Unveils The Hoverla & Forest Song, New Pedals For 2024

One of my favorite pedal builders has a new treble boost and ultra flexible drive pedal for your gain needs.

Today on Guitars For Idiots we’re covering two fantastic new pedals from Drunk Beaver Pedals. The Polish-based builder was a big winner in my 2023 pedal review rankings on Ultimate Guitar, and recently landed in my list of favorite European builders. So yeah, you know these are going to be good.

The two new pedals are the Hoverla and Forest Song. The Hoverla is a germanium treble booster, while the Forest Song is a flexible overdrive. At first glance, you may not think these pedals are relatively exciting or groundbreaking. However, what Drunk Beaver Pedals has done here is ingenious and if nothing else, will replace a handful of your drive pedals with just one. Let’s dive in.

Meet the Hoverla: The Hoverla is based on your classic germanium treble booster with a few interesting twists. Featuring a pickup simulator mode with a built-in buffer, you can adjust the impedance of your signal to allow for a wide range of new sounds. Whether you’re pairing the pedal with different pickups, or just want to simulate different pickups, Hoverla’s got quite the feature set for it.

On top of that, you can alter the frequencies that the Hoverla boosts. Using the range knob, you can essentially make it work as a bass boost, a treble boost, or a full frequency EQ boost. So pairing this with the impedance function of the pickup sim makes for a quite adventurous germanium treble booster.

Lastly, you have volume and bias controls that we haven’t covered. Volume is pretty straightforward, though bias allows for you to get quite a bit more gain and bite into your signal.

My Thoughts: The Hoverla is a classic “make-better-er” pedal. What I mean is that you can basically layer it on top of anything and it will improve the tone. These pedals are sometimes hard for me to find use for, because I often play very high gain tones where the impact of such pedals is lessened. However, for some of the ambient stuff I write and play, or with in a band setting, this pedal seems like it’d be a home run for me. Drunk Beaver Pedals has a knack for taking classic circuits and making them more versatile, that’s what really got me to fall so hard for their Jellyfish pedal that I use with my band.

I think they’re really nailing that vibe again here with the Hoverla, albeit I find germanium treble boosts a little less exciting than a good chorus pedal. But, this pedal sounds undeniably good to me, and the Hoverla also stacked really nicely with the DOD-250 flavored overdrive I used in my demo. It may not have the fanciest germanium diodes in the world, but if I’m going to keep a germanium treble boost around, I’m picking this over those trendy JHS Germanium Boosts.

Mostly though, I’m curious to see how my opinion of this pedal evolves. The Hoverla seems like it may have some secret weapon potential, and it’s earned a slot on my band board to investigate further.

Meet the Forest Song: While the Hoverla is plenty powerful, the Forest Song may be even more capable. This is Drunk Beaver Pedals’ newest release and is a multi-mode overdrive pedal. While I’ll admit it is getting harder and harder for me to get excited about overdrives, the Forest Song has a few tricks up its sleeve.

You have six flavors of gain to choose from, all controlled by the 6-way mode knob. The modes are, in order from 1-6; boost, LED clipping, Mosfet clipping, Silicon diode, Germanium diode, and Asymmetrical Silicon diodes. Okay that’s a lot. Better yet, it has two voltage modes, a standard 9v, and higher voltage mode for more volume, headroom, and power. Note, the higher voltage mode runs off of a 9v power supply but internally pumps the charge. Volume, resonance, and drive knobs wrap up the impressive control panel.

Before we dive further let’s break down what all those modes mean. The boost mode is self explanatory, less of a gain increase, more volume, just adds a little more oomph. LED clipping makes me think of the ProCo Turbo Rat, whereas silicon diode clipping is reminiscent of a Tube Screamer (two symmetrical) or a RAT. Germanium brings you into more vintage territory, think Klon or old fuzzes at lower volumes. Asymmetrical silicon diodes is the Boss SD-1 formula, and it rocks. Lastly Mosfet is more in the vein of the Crook/OCD-type of space.

My Thoughts:

There’s two things to point out about the Forest Song. Firstly, it sounds great, the overdriven tones are warm and dirty and all things good. Secondly, I can’t really hear that much of a difference between all these voicings. I know that Ge and Si sound different from another, I know LED is also different. It’s not that apparent in this pedal that’s put in front of me. Now sometimes it was a little more obvious, like when switching to the asymmetrical silicon clipping mode, which was my favorite by the way.

Maybe my ear is just not refined enough for these subtle differences, but the Forest Song just always kind of sounds like the Forest Song, just with some changes in volume and grit that I feel are more subtle than substantial. However, that distinct overdrive flavor is great, so it’s important to remember this pedal is built around a really strong base sound. Now, when using the increased voltage mode, the pedal did provide some nice headroom and played well while manipulating volume on my amp sim.

Overall, the Forest Song is strong sounding drive pedal that would fit will in my rig, though maybe it is better suited for true audiophiles who can decipher germanium from silicon better than I. Or perhaps my specific guitar rig is coloring the sound too much to explore that difference. Whatever the reason, it’s still a strong pedal from Drunk Beaver Pedals, but I think the Hoverla wins out for me if I was to put these two head to head.