The Mad Professor Royal Blue Overdrive is a medium gain pedal with tube amp-like crunchy ‘strike hard for distortion’ (as Mad Professor call it) tones available. Just one quick note, the delay in this demo is coming from an Empress Superdelay in the effects loop of a Ceriatone Chupacabra 50 amp.

The overdrive is really smooth but also touch sensitive so you could use the volume control to switch between a clean and overdriven tone very easily (with an amp set clean). If you have a volume pedal that has the ability to switch between a minimum and maximum volume setting (like the Ernie Ball MVP) you can easily replicate a 2 channel amp just by controlling the volume output from your guitar.

In the case of this demo, there's a blower switch on a Cilia CGA7  so as to set the volume to very low on the guitar to get a clean tone and then flick the switch to instantly bypass the volume circuit for the overdrive tone. In addition players can also set the pickup selector to the neck and roll off the volume for a super clean tone and then the blower switch will go back to the bridge humbucker with the volume at 10 (actually it is completely bypassed).




Not many overdrive pedals allow this kind of amp-like control and it also means you can chain the pedal with another boost or overdrive pedal to create various layers of gain.

This pedal has slightly more gain than the Sweet Honey Overdrive and has a smoother character, by rolling off the treble you can get a nice creamy overdrive tone great for legato lines. Roll off the bass and increase the treble to cut through the mix with a more bitey Marshall style crunch. Overall it's a great overdrive pedal that covers a lot of ground.

Thanks to the fine folks at GuitarNoize.com for this great review /demo.

For more information head over to the Mad Professor website.