Substation Onyx

We’re excited to finally and formally announce the launch of the Opaque Drive, our debut guitar pedal! The Opaque Drive becomes available for purchase this Friday, August 25th. For more information regarding purchasing one of these, you can visit the product page.

The Opaque Drive is a dual overdrive, featuring two independent overdrive circuits that are both meant to embody separate roles that the overdrive pedal has taken on. The first stage, Silver, allows you to take control of your guitar’s frequency information by tailoring your low-end and sculpting your mids for that perfect punchy boost or an amp-like breakup and feel. The second stage, Gold, offers a variety of distortion flavors so you can impart a little extra dirt and brightness on your sound to complement a clean-to-mid-gain amplifier, or to boost a gainy amp into articulate saturation. To hear a more in-depth description with sound samples, watch our tech demo:

Is this the overdrive you’re looking for?

Lots of folks have asked me what this pedal will sound like, and what kind of overdrives Gold and Silver are. While a majority of overdrive pedals use similar circuit topologies and have many similar sounds, rest assured: this design is not another Tube Screamer.

Both Silver and Gold started life as copies of a common ancestor: a hard-clipping overdrive devised in 2004 that some tend to be… obsessive-compulsive over. The circuits were then individually tweaked to specialize their own sound. Silver received two separate mods to either preserve or attenuate low end, and instead of a tone control, it features a unique mid-frequency control. Silver’s clipping section featuring three MOSFETs arranged around a resistor is also very unique.

Gold’s heritage is more diverse, and turns its attention away from the progenitor to include desireable features from other famous guitar pedals. Instead of a treble-bleed style tone, Gold’s tone control is a punchier, less band-limited version of the tone control from the classic Screamer. This tone parameter is partially defused from your high end, keeping your tone fairly bright except on only the darkest settings. A much sought-after dual overdrive king provided influence for the soft clipping and boost modes, while the hard-clipping features LEDs like the turbo variant of a popular black distortion box, as opposed to diodes.

Altogether, there’s something in the Opaque Drive for every guitar player who loves using overdrives, regardless of whether we use them to assist a high-gain amp into the realm of tight, modern metal or as the sonic foundation of our guitar tones. Each side is capable of assuming a light- or medium-gain ovedrive role, allowing for complete flexibility and a variety of uses in every style of music!

If you have any questions in obtaining your Opaque Drive, feel free to contact us!