Friedman BE-OD Overdrive Pedal

Have purchased this pedal after watching numerous demos and reviews on you tube. This resulting in high expectations from this pedal and finally when i received this pedal and when plugged in I was bit disappointed. Which I will tell you why down the line. Built quality is nice so as the packaging and comes wit a manual card. Coming to the pedal, this pedal is a high gain distortion and less of overdrive. It has a trim pot inside which is by default at 12 o'clock and even if you set it to minimum there is still a lot of gain. The gain/distortion tone is more like Marshallish and has ton of hair if you know what i mean, lot of highs & lows but mids are not pronounced enough resulting the distortion to sound thin when you play individual notes/ soloing. However there is a lot of chug/body for power chords or riffing. The pedal is quite versatile with presence control and you can tweak anti clock wise for brighter sounding amps and clockwise if you amp is on the warmer sounding side. Tight knob comes handy and is quite responsive and so as the treble but there is still a lot of bass even if you tweak below 9 o'clock. but remind you notes still sound thin even when you push the bass know past 12 o'clock which is the main cause of my disappointment. However this pedal is one of the bst sounding distortion pedal i have tried so far in last one decade of playing music and trust me I have owned or played atleast 25 to 30 various distortion pedals alone. I have been using wampler soverign distortion for a long time and this pedal is rich in mids and great playing solos as the each note sounds fat and ballsy compared to Friedman BE-OD. But mind you these two pedals are totally different. Friedman is for you if are into high gain stuffs and riff a lot as this pedal gives you that ballsy tone but if you are more into blues of overdrive tome territory of mids lover this may not be an ideal one.

This pedal, if used correctly, sounds very close to an overdrive channel on a tube amplifier akin to a Friedman BE-100 or say a Victory V30. Though it operates very well on 9v, I recently experienced that if you can feed it 18v, the headroom opens up and it proceeds to sound like a serious tube amp. A thing to note when you buy this: The eq on this pedal is super useful but not what you might expect! What we are used to in our average three-knob od pedal is a tone knob which goes from acting as a low pass filter all the way to the left and like a low cut all the way to the right. While that is an efficient and practical system, that is not the function of the eq on the BE-OD. The BE-OD has an elaborate 4 knob eq - Bass, Treble, Presence, and Tight. They are meant to be interacted with in relation to your amp+cab (or simulation of the same) to make them sound like a quasi BE-100 in conjunction. - The Bass knob doesn't handle frequencies in the guitar's range but instead tackles the bass response of the cabinet(sim) akin to an output resonance control on certain higher gain amps. - The Presence similarly handles the airy top end not necessarily super focussed on the guitar's range but on the response of the cabinet. - Treble is slightly more traditional as it does increase or reduce the level of the high end of your guitar's signal. Reducing it gives you significantly subdued attack transients and vice versa. - Tight!!! Tight is SO useful! It allows you to take out the specific bass frequencies which tend to ring out while playing a palm-muted/short note rate pattern, however good your technique is. Heavy Metal guitarists who are inclined towards the more polyrhythmic percussive *cough cough dj0nt cough cough* will know what I'm talking about. Having control over that without significantly changing the tone of the overdrive is a huge plus! One final thing. Do not be swayed by reviews that whine about the excessive gain that this pedal has. Yes, it does, but you can also open up the back to access the gain trip pot. The lowest gain you can get from this pedal is akin to pushing a slightly hairy clean amp into overdrive. Imagine a Plexi on the edge of break up (just before the Plexi's significant other finds out, lol). Bear in mind, that the gain trim also has the slightest effect on the mids of this pedal. The lower you set it, the mids get boosted ever so slightly. If you're in the market for a super hot-rodded extra hot marshall-y double spicy brown sound type amp channel in a pedal chassis AND THAT IS IT...Friedman Be-OD is the one for you! I expected this when I bought it and I regret nothing! Hope you find what you're looking for :)