The ‘Brown Sound’ is one of the most sought after guitar tones in the world. While you can still get this tone from using similar gear to the orignal recordings made but this requires multiple thousands of pounds and tracking down some precious vintage gear. Now You can get that sound in one pedal with the Distortion/Reverb ‘1’ pedal by Mad Professor.
One Pedal, All Of The Tone
The joy of pedal designs like this is that you only need this one thing to completely transform your small clean amp in to a screaming, distorted British style stack with a huge stadium filling reverb.
The Distortion
This side of the pedal is controlled by Brown, Level and Presence controls. The Brown is your overdrive which goes from a mid gain crunch to high gain saturated distortion with a bit of 80’s flare. This is not a hyper modern sounding pedal it is still very much set in its decade of tone. The level acts as you would expect and the Presence control is your tone control, mainly focused on the high end and how much that is being pushed through the amplifier.
Reverb
On the front you just have a single Reverb control which acts as your level. The prest decay and tone of the pedal is made to perfectly match the screaming solos of this generation of players but if you need to change it up there are two small trim pots inside the pedal so you can adjust this further.
Here’s what Mad Professor say about the 1 Overdrive
“1” IS A DISTORTION/REVERB PEDAL DESIGNED TO PROVIDE THE SOUGHT AFTER “BROWN” GUITAR SOUND OF THE LATE 70’S EARLY 80’S, WHEN PLAYED THROUGH A CLEAN AMPLIFIER.
Like that legendary tone, this pedal produces intense drive while retaining high definition. The pedal also includes a built in reverb circuit to add ambience and depth to your sound.
“1”‘s gain ranges from medium to very heavy distortion. The amount can be easily controlled via the volume control of your guitar. (Input impedance is set to facilitate this, and is somewhat negated if a buffer or buffered effect is used ahead of “1”.)
The Brown knob controls the amount and harmonic overtones of the distortion. Getting the exact tonal quality is the key to this legendary sound and “1”‘s Brown and Presence controls help it appropriately interface with a wide variety of pickups and amplifiers.
“1”‘s built in Reverb circuit with a Level control for setting the ambience. The sound is modeled after the studio reverb found on classic recordings from the 80’s. The decay time is preset so as not to mess the rhythm of your playing. The preset decay time and tone can be modified with trimmers inside the pedal.
