UNDERDRIVE- LOTUS PEDALS DESIGNS Snowjob Underdrive ...maybe true?

LOTUS PEDAL DESIGNS SNOWJOB UNDERDRIVE

$200.00 USD

I did a review light years ago but the pedal can still be found new. It came out in 2014. The guy had an idea that the world needed a great transparent OD. In 2014 such an idea bordered on a bad joke. Now uys pay anything for the right one. Even with good reviews it died. The biggest problem was that in 2014 ...$150,00 USD for a pedal was considered ridiculously high, lol.

The company was very unusual. The owner was a an electronics school teacher at a community college and felt that his students would learn a lot more and find a deeper interested in learning if they could actually make something someone would buy. The school was impressed but demanded that all costs had to be covered by the sales of 

the pedals. The teacher made zero on the sales. The $150 merely was the break even point. Losses came out of the guys own pocket. 

It worked out fine as long as the guy spent all his free time promoting, marketing shipping, receiving etc. etc. He got burnt out after several years and closed down 

the company until 'further notice'. In short with all the labor involved it is really a $250.00 handmade gourmet pedal.

WHAT IS IT?

About 35 years ago a new product called an Aural Exciter came out. What it did within it's circuit was to distort the signal to beyond the craziest Fuzz pedal. 

It then used a low pass filter and removed everything but any frequencies between 700Hz and 7kHz. These frequencies are virtually the overtones on their own. They are then mixed into the clean signal. It was originally a rack mount unit to put on vocals. The very first user was David Bowie. It added sparkle, clarity and definition and since it boosted even the the overtones that do not get boosted in any original signal you got double the overtones.

I think the 'Underdrive' is an Aural Exciter with a clean boost pedal blended together.

The layout is the same as an OD in that you have volume and gain and a boost to take it into a light crunch.

CONCLUSION

Impressive!!! Yes it is an OD. But it is best described as a Boost pedal with hair. The trouble with the best clean sounding tube amp unless you run it loud enough to cause its signal to help keep the wood and the strings vibrating or feed back thru your PU's you will have dead space between the notes. Your fingers may even be making a nice vibrato but no sound is reaching the amp. It not only sounds bad to you but to your audience. Your technique can be great but no one will ever know it.

You can still find new ones online and a few used ones.