Review: Elektron Analog Drive Pedal

PLATINUM AWARD

If you’ve been playing electric guitar for a while and you crave distorted tones in all their various colors and styles, you’ve probably already amassed a decent collection of overdrive, distortion and fuzz pedals.

For the most crazed connoisseurs of crunch, the Elektron Analog Drive, which offers eight different types of distortion in a single pedal, may be the last and only distortion pedal they’ll ever need.

Covering the gamut from clean boost and overdrive to fuzz and high-gain mayhem, the Elektron Analog Drive is a fully professional-quality distortion effects unit featuring a 100 percent analog signal path, three-band EQ with sweepable midrange, 100 user preset slots, MIDI In/Out, and much more.

FEATURES
Inside its relatively oversized housing, which occupies about the same real estate on a pedal board as three or four standard-size stomp boxes, the Elektron Analog Drive boasts eight completely independent overdrive/distortion circuits, each with its own distinctive textural character. A large rotary dial manually selects Clean Boost, Mid Drive, Dirty Drive, Big Distortion, Focused Distortion, Harmonic Fuzz, High Gain and Thick Gain settings.

Gain and Level controls allow users to further sculpt the distortion texture and character, and Low, Mid Frequency, Mid and High EQ controls provide a useful range of tone-tweaking possibilities. Users can manually scroll through the 100 presets using the rotary Preset knob or the up and down footswitches, or they can select any desired preset using a MIDI controller connected to the unit’s MIDI In. Program change and controller can also be transmitted via the MIDI Out. The pedal also includes separate 1/4-inch expression pedal jacks for manually controlling gain and midrange settings.

PEFORMANCE
While the eight different distortion circuits in the Elektron Analog Drive provide a full variety of overdrive, distortion