Audio! Audio! Releases Their Superdrive, And It Lives Up To The Name

This is a highly versatile and flexible gain pedal for the discerning gear knucklehead.

You may remember Audio! Audio! and their Superdrive gain pedal from our recent Tube Screamer project! It’s a vaguely Tube Screamer based pedal, but has a ton of tweaks to make it far more flexible courtesy of builder Lucky (the monster). You can of course go revisit that article, but I’ll run down some key features again here. There’s a 3-band EQ (second row of knobs), presence, gain, and volume knobs all onboard. There’s an internal dip switch for toggling between buffer/true bypass, plus it can run on 9-18v. The toggle switches are explained below:

3 Clipping Diodes:

You can choose between three styles of clipping including germanium + MOSFET, red LED, and silicon. Silicon gives you more of the classic TS-sound, if that’s what brought you here.

3 Clipping Modes:

You also have three types of clipping modes to mix and match with your diode selection! There’s hard clipping (think RAT), soft clipping (think TS808), and a clean boost mode.

3 Gain Levels

Sick of the features? Well here are 3 more options for you! You can use the furthest left toggle to switch between low, medium, and high gain levels.

Demo Time

Here I’m running my Maybach Little Wing’s bridge P90 pickup into this Superdrive and my UAFX Dream amp/cab simulator. The pedal is definitely a little bit noisy, even when I’m running it with isolated power at 9 volts.

My Thoughts

The Superdrive is highly impressive, let’s get that straight. This is a ton of engineering and tone tweaking for the (recently reduced) price of $199 USD. It’s literally dozens of combinations of pedals in one box that has convenient top jacks and a unique, lo-fi aesthetic. Make no mistake, this is a LOUD pedal though. I struggled to coax any true “clean boost” sounds out of the pedal, but it is of course possible I just need more time to really settle into this pedal.

That’s always the thing with these sorts of complex drive pedals, you can easily miss a feature or two while trying to explore the sonic space. I did connect with this pedal pretty quickly though, and the range of high gain crunch has impressed me. There’s so much fun to be had when you toggle between the clipping modes, and the germanium/MOSFET combo is a nice touch. That’s a combo I don’t see too often, but it kind of nicely opens the pedal up a bit more than the compressed silicon

This is definitely best suited for people who play clean amps like I do. I know the Superdrive would work totally fine with cranked amps, but it is so massive and crushing that it seems well suited to help take your clean amp to a wild space.

Audio! Audio!’s Superdrive gets the nod of approval for me, as it feels like a Circle Jerks/Black Flag guitar tone starter kit. Early, sleezy SoCal punk just oozes out of this thing. I’m having a lot of fun, and I appreciate the utility of the Superdrive. Maybe some of you can tame it down better than I, but it’s worth the price of admission just for these high gain sounds.

The only drawback is that it was generally a little crackly and noisy through my standard pedal testing rig (UAFX dream and Maybach guitar). I did run it with isolated power, but the crackle did kind of add to the overall effect of the distortion. It’s a loud, raw, and in your face pedal, which totally still works for me. In fact, this will definitely make it on to my gigging board for next band practice, as I think this will totally shred my amp’s clean signal in a nice way for retro solo sounds. Overall, it’s a thumbs up from me, and I recommend it to those of you who prioritize crunch and volume above pristine, transparent drives.