Great Eastern FX Co channels the tone mojo of a cranked Fender Champ with the Small Speaker Overdrive pedal

Great Eastern FX Co has made its pedalboard debut with an amp-in-a-box style overdrive pedal that deals in the rich, musical grit you get from a small tube amp pushed to the limit.

Indeed, the Small Speaker Overdrive has the archetypical small guitar amp in mind, the hallowed Fender Champ, and as any studio engineer or pro will tell you, great things happen when you give those compact combos something to thing about.

The Small Speaker Overdrive is Great Eastern’s first ever stompbox, and it arranges a quartet of knobs around an LED that signals when the effect is engaged or not.

There are controls for Gain, Level, High and Low, and the idea is that it offers a touch-sensitive drive that can be used to add just a dash of hot sauce boost and overdrive grit to make your amp sing, or at extreme settings, the pedal will leave that clean boost on the canvas and give up some “honky, saturated drive”. 

Its EQ stage operates a little differently to most overdrives, with the High control operating as a boost/cut, and the Low control as a boost, meaning you can really dial in a precise level of top-end sparkle on this.

The Small Speaker Overdrive is designed and built in the UK, using low-noise metal film resistors, PET film capacitors, Alpha pots and Neutrik jack sockets. It’s available now, priced  £219. See Great Eastern FX Co for more details.