Pedal spotlight – The “ZEN” drive

Here is my ZEN drive clone, what an amazing sounding overdrive. This is based on the famous Ibanez Tube screamer with some nice additions. The pedal is very dynamic to your playing (play light it stays clean, play hard and it adds a very tube like overdrive). The pedal includes 4 controls: Drive, controls the level of overdrive/distortion, Volume, controls output volume, Tone, controls overall tone, and Voice, which controls the tone of the overdrive by changing if the clipping (distortion) affects bass vs mids/highs.

I must say the box came out pretty cool too, bummer there is an extra hole in there, but I rehoused an earlier pedal that didn’t sound good that had a small 3mm LED in that spot.

This was a fairly easy build. I used the Burr Brown Op-Amp (OPA2604) but I have the original (AD712) on hand to see if it sounds better with that chip. For builds like this make sure you use a socket for the op-amp, you are going to want to experiment with different ones.