I think all of you looking for a great lead or mild drive tone should seriously consider a Danelectro CTO-1 instead of your Tubescreamer/SD-1 type pedals. Why? Well first because they're about to be discontinued and replaced with the CTO-2, which will use a different circuit, and because I honestly believe these things are going to become as legendary as the original TS808s are one day.

And what makes them so great you ask? Well Steve, the owner of Danelectro put up a post on thegearpage.net that admitted to borrowing components for the CTO 1s circuit from the Paul Cochrane Tim/Timmy pedals and that once the CTO1 is discontinued the CTO2 will use a different circuit from Paul Cochrane's (if you don't know these are the final say in transparent overdrives, they're all handmade one at a time by paul who has no website and can only be contacted by phone; you have to wait 8 months to get yours cause he has soo many orders).

The Paul Cochrane pedals go for $160 new and you have to get on the bottom of the waiting list, they sell for over $200 on ebay because of the extremely high demand and limited supply. The Cool Cat CTO1 sells brand new for $39 and goes on ebay for way less. So if you need a low gain transparent boost put this on your list, maybe even buy two just in case they do become legendary in a few years. 😉

Please keep in mind these are not high gain pedals, they are for pushing a tube amp thats on the verge of saturation into overdriving, this is what the true purpose of a TS808 tubescreamer is, but it has many shortcomings: mid spike, sucks bass and highend, sucks tone when not engaged, doesn't have a lot of gain or output on tap, and is really really expensive for what it is because of the hype surrounding it. Pedals like the Fulldrive, OCD, Blues Pro, Alberta, Barber LTD, HotCake are all trying to fix these problems in the original circuits. I've owned/own all the above and the Paul Cochrane Tim is still the most transparent. Now, since according to the owner of Danelectro he stole Paul's circuit, you can get the same circuit for much less then half the price.

Check it out mother####ers!