I've changed my mind about TS-style overdrives.
I called them mid-humped, boring, and overrated. I've been wrong for about a decade.
Two sides. One page.
Jason argues the piece. Johnny argues against it. Read both, then call the winner below.
The take is shown below.
If you've read anything I've written about overdrives in the last ten years, you know I've held a consistent and confident position: Tube Screamer-style pedals are mid-humped, dynamically compressed, tonally boring, and have been overrated by a generation of blues players who don't know what a transparent overdrive sounds like. I wrote some version of that sentence in print, in podcasts, in DMs to friends who asked. I sold every TS-style pedal I owned. I bought Klons and Timmys and Fulldrives and OCDs. I thought I'd figured it out.
I was wrong. Or, more precisely, I was right about what a Tube Screamer does and wrong about whether that's a flaw.
This is a piece about changing your mind, which is something the gear discourse online is structurally bad at, because the incentive structure of being a person who writes about gear rewards confident takes and punishes reversals. I'm reversing anyway, because the alternative is continuing to be wrong, and being wrong is more embarrassing than admitting I was.
Here's what changed. About eight months ago I was sitting in with a band I hadn't played with before — soul revue, three horns, a Hammond, the works — and the bandleader handed me a Tube Screamer to put on my board for the night because that's what he used and he didn't want to spend the soundcheck arguing about it. I put it on the board. I was annoyed. I expected to hate it. I plugged in.
It sounded right. Not just acceptable. Right. The mid-hump that I'd spent a decade complaining about turned out to be exactly what was needed to push a Tele through a horn arrangement without disappearing. The dynamic compression that I'd called 'boring' turned out to be what kept the guitar consistent under a vocalist who was already working hard. The 'lack of transparency' that I'd held against TS-style pedals turned out to be a feature: the pedal had a voice, and the voice fit the gig.
I'd been evaluating overdrives on the wrong axis. I'd been treating 'transparency' as a virtue — the more the pedal disappears, the better — when in fact the right question is 'does this pedal have the right voice for the music it's playing.' Transparent overdrives are great for some things. They're great for letting a Strat through a Twin be a Strat through a Twin, just a little louder and a little broken up. They're not great for cutting through a horn section, or sitting on top of a midrange-heavy mix, or doing the specific thing a Tube Screamer does, which is essentially functioning as a midrange EQ with overdrive built in.
The TS isn't a worse overdrive than a Klon. It's a different tool for a different job. I treated it like a worse Klon for ten years because I had a particular kind of gig in mind — sparse, three-piece, room for the guitar to sit anywhere it wants — and from that vantage point the Klon is correct and the TS is wrong. Change the gig, change the answer.
I now own two TS-style pedals: a modded Tube Screamer Mini and a Maxon OD808. They live on my board for the soul gigs. The Klon is still on the board for everything else. None of them are the 'best' overdrive. There is no best overdrive. There is only the question of what you're trying to do this Saturday night.
The lesson, I think, is that confident takes about gear age badly. The pedals don't change. The contexts do. And if you've been gigging the same kind of music for ten years and you think you've figured out what your favorite pedal is, the smartest thing you can do is take a gig that's completely different from what you usually play and see what your favorites do under stress.
Mine fell apart. I'm better for it.
> Transparent overdrives are great for letting a Strat through a Twin be a Strat through a Twin. They're not great for cutting through a horn section.
— Jason
Nothing was wrong and nothing got corrected. The TS was wrong for his old gigs and right for the soul revue. A verdict that flips with the band is not a verdict.
The essay is structured as a recantation, a decade of anti-Tube-Screamer writing repented in public, and public repentance is good copy. But look at the actual evidence on both ends. The decade of scorn was earned in contexts, trios, transparent-drive rigs, klons and Timmys doing klon and Timmy jobs, where a mid-humped compressor genuinely was the wrong tool. The conversion happened in a soul revue with three horns and a Hammond, the one arrangement on earth where a 720 Hz hump and a compressed attack is not a flaw but the entire job description. Both verdicts were correct where they were issued.
Which means the confession confesses the wrong crime. I was wrong for a decade makes the author the story and sells the drama of reversal. The accurate sentence, the pedal is context-dependent and I mistook my context for the world, has no drama, indicts nothing, and teaches the reader the actual lesson: that every strong gear opinion in this magazine, including the recantation itself, is a photograph of the writer's current gig. Today's TS revelation was minted in a horn band. The reader in a bedroom with a Katana inherits a conclusion built for a stage they will never stand on.
There is also a market consequence to public conversions that the house should flag. The confident takedown moved readers off Tube Screamers for years. The confident reversal will move them back. Both migrations transferred real money on the strength of one musician's changing employment, and neither essay carried the disclosure that would have cost nothing: your band is the spec sheet. Check yours before adopting mine.
Changing your mind in public is the best thing this masthead does. Next time, change it all the way, to the position that survives every bandstand: the pedal was never the variable. The gig was.
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