OVERDRIVE- J. ROCKETT Animal OD ...a 68 Plexi that captures the just before breakup sound with perfection!!!

 J. ROCKETT ANIMAL OD 
A few years ago I was just getting into buying some serious pedals

$190.00 USD

and like many of you I wanted a deadly lead sound from my first OD.
Oddly enough I tried the Animal and just thought it was Ok but not exciting. This is true  ...but once your lead sound is sorted you will at some point need that perfected 'tamed' OD to accompany a singer.

The trouble with all OD pedals is that the best they have are  FET's to capture a tube sound. They can be designed to capture a distortion range beautifully to either do a nice medium or high gain but they do not ...like an amp run smoothly from one to another starting with dead clean then smoothly move up to crunch and beyond.
Unfortunately we are all guilty of loving some great dirt so no one does a focus on capturing the low gain on the edge of breakup sound.
Worse still it is very hard to get smooth so those that try usually in my opinion not only fail but the nice chunky area between clean and breakup is unusable.
This 68 Plexi sound has it nailed. I am very impressed!



It gives you that sound just before breakup where it has a very, very smooth creamy fatness but your guitars tone is so clear and clean with a touch of the twang of the steel in your strings you could even do finger picking and wonderful arpeggio's.
Nothing I have heard does this so well.
I have often pointed it out that in a band we spend most of the night playing an accompaniment role and yet our dirt boxes that are 'light' enough to do this so well and are a joy to play are near non existent.

This moves up very high on my 'Gotta Have' list!
A perfect ten!!!
I can not afford it right now.
I ordered one. LOL

If like me every order you make you get nervous because 
you have had too many bad days with pedals that  
you soon found are OK but do not really 'cut' it. 
Good news ...this pedal has been around since 2010
and with the new Tour Series we get v.2 that lets us control 
the 'snarl' from our volume control instead of the switch 
that was an either/or.

I don't think it will be disappearing soon. 
Considering their popularity used ones are hard to find. 
Could it be that the owners see no need to dump them? 
Perhaps it is because there isn't any new and improved take 
on it by the competition?
I think so. There are very few OD's on the whole planet
I have not checked out. There are well over a hundred on this Blog alone.

HANDS ON

Well first the bad news. The Tour series does not have the 'boost' switch and to be honest the pedal 

can not put out the aggressive distortion that the old v.1 does.

This poses me no problem for me as I wanted it for the classic Plexi on '4'. this is a clean but incredible fat sound with rich compression that when the attack of your note or chord makes the compressor sag. Then in just a half a moment later the transformer recovers causing the note or chord to sustain and the to bloom. 

If on the other hand the old v.1 does this too. So I recommend v. 1 for most of you. You will even find a few NEW old stock ones around but no one is discounting them.

In the same territory is 
LOVEPEDALS Purple Plexi ....check out the post