Harley Benton Ultimate Drive

Summary: It adds a lot of low-end (bass tones) to your guitar signal, and it can get really noisy. However, it seems to go well with single-coil pickups (at least much better than humbuckers).

I wanted to have a pedal in front of my amp that has overdrive/distortion characteristics, specifically to use with humbucker pickups. Since this is a cheap option, and it has relatively good reviews, I wanted to give it a try.

First of all, Low/High switch doesn't change too much if you are connected to a cranked amp.
The pedal is quite noisy (both with clean and cranked amps), especially if the gain and level knobs are beyond 12 o'clock.
The worst part for me is that it adds a lot of low frequencies to your guitar signal i.e., it adds lots of bass tones.
When I tried it with humbucker pickups into a Marshall DSL, due to the nature of humbuckers, the bass response was awful such that I couldn't even tune it with the EQ of my amp.
Then, I tried it with my telecaster (single-coil pickups) into my Fender Twin. I liked that sound since it added a bass response on top of the brightness of my tele. However, I didn't plan to add a pedal to my 'clean' rig. So I returned the item.

I think this is a fairly sound and useful product with a few flaws that kind of serve to limit its versatility.

Starting with the pros: sturdy metal casing with a good weight, all switches and dials are smooth and function properly. It is an effective boost/drive that on selected instruments and used in selective ways (very low gain settings, bright sounding guitars) can be most effective.
Cons: It has just one pretty major issue in that the tone gets overpoweringly
bassy as the gain is increased. This can only to some extent be sorted with basic eq controls. You can turn the pedal tone right up to compensate but it sounds horrible. Basically for giving the amp a boost and a tiny bit of gain it sounds pretty good, anything else is a matter of carefully chosing instrument and dialling away until you get a usable tone!

Known to be an 'OCD' clone, which has become a classis amond drive pedals.

Never tried an OCD, so I bought that one in order to get an idea.

Quality seems great (metal box does a lot), even if the plastic knobs are looking cheap, the pedal isn't noisy and does a great job.

The overdrives are nice, the sound panel is quiet impressive, keeping a good personnality. Nice job also as clean boost ! The compression is a stronger than in my average overdrive pedals, which I think is really interesting.

+:
Metal enclosure
Silent
Great sound panel (clean boost to hi-low gain overdrives)
Respect of the instrument personality
Interesting compression

-:
Knob are turning a bit too easily, I'd prefer them to keep the settings a bit stronger, as the setup is quite sensitive (but seriously, that's nothing)

Bought this pedal as my beloved Digitech Death Metal felt possibly a bit out of hand when pumped up to band rehearsal volumes outside of a metal context. It's my first overdrive pedal. I play through a Kustom Defender H valve head and that sounds pretty nice. Breaks up a bit as it gets louder. I wanted to see whether what would happen to the valve amp with an Overdrive in front of it rather than a metal distortion pedal. The general consensus on the web is that these particular Joyo pedals (Thomann have had them rebranded by the looks of it) are good-sounding units for the money so seemed an inexpensive way to try.

I'm very impressed. Adds a lot of volume and a lot of warm character. Gain on full is not great (gets pretty flabby) but all knobs around mid-way adds tons of shape and beef. I very much like how all notes are still audible through the overdrive and how it cleans up nicely when the guitar volume knob is rolled off. Full chords sound marvellous.

The general tone is a bit mid-rangey for my taste but not outrageous by any means. The mini toggle switch has high and low settings which flavour things as you'd expect. As there isn't much in the way on tone controls on my amp i'm shaping it with a separate eq pedal to get more of a metal-flavour in there and it's great. Hard to put the guitar down and walk away.

The build seems solid. I'll be a little bit more careful with it than other brands as it has been made as cheaply but I'm not concerned about it.

All in all, very pleased. Amazing value.