I had to sell my echolution recently to buy groceries, and with the money I had left over I bought my guitar teacher's zendrive.
The zendrive is not very transparent, but it sounds great. I don't know how it would sound through a mid-heavy amp, but through the mid-dipped Twin Reverb I use it sounds great for lead playing. It has a very vocal sound to it, it sounds like it's almost on the verge of feedback but not quite there, as a result you can coax a lot of different tones out of it by playing with your volume knob and picking technique. It really responds to how hard you pick the string. My guitar teacher plays through a Roland Jazz and a Mesa for his minimal rock playing and he didn't like the way it matched his amps I guess, but through mine it's the best overdrive I've used. They say it's a Dumble in a box, and though I've never played a Dumble it certainly does sound very rich. I'm really interested in the Zendrive 2 now with it's single 12ax7 tube.
I have the LTD Special Recipe which is a little more transparent then the normal LTD. It has a very low amount of drive, but a lot of boost. It is very transparent, but is brighter then the Zendrive or my Blues Pro. The drive character is smooth, and it doesn't cut bass like most other overdrives, but it still has a very slight boost in the upper mids. It's great for cutting through the mix when you set the level high and drive at about 2. It functions now as my tubescreamers once did, as the sort of brighter low gain overdrive I use for sparkley leads tones, the zendrive I use for thick harmonicly rich leads, and the blues pro I use with the tone low (which boosts the bass) for a really thick bluesy tone. At the end of this chain I have a Barber Dirty Bomb which I use for the occassional hi-gain sound, and then I have my transparent overdrive and keeley katana which I kick on if I need even more boost.
So my board now is almost all overdrives and boosts, I'm going to be down sizing it soon to make room for a new delay pedal (hopefully a T-Rex Replica if I can get the money), but the LTD and Zendrive will definitely be staying.
