OCD
A Fulltone OCD pedal comes home to live with the Ceriatone DC30
Back at Thanksgiving, I was bitching about the Ceriatone DC30 to my brother-in-law. Dissatisfied with how the DC30 sounded, I was looking for an excuse to buy a new amp. Instead of buying a new amp, he suggested buying an overdrive or distortion pedal, saying it would give me a new sonic palette without breaking the bank. Good advise, but I didn’t want to listen at the time.
Fast-forward three months and a handful of new tubes and I’m the proud owner of a new Fulltone OCD. After putting some new tubes in the DC30 and being well pleased with the results, I figured that a pedal might be a good alternative to buying a whole new amp. After researching a bit on TGP, I kept finding mention of how good the OCD is so I took a run down to Lark Street Music and picked one up.
Initial impressions: The OCD can be used as a clean boost, or to add gain. There is also a tone control and a “HP/LP” switch. After some tweaking, I found that setting the boost fairly low—around 9:30-10:00—and adding dialing the drive to around 10:30 really works well for me. I dialed the tone up to around 1:00, and set the HP/LP switch to LP. Setup this way, the OCD sounds great into the DC30’s EF86 channel with the volume set at around 11:00. It pushes the amp into a nice crunchy overdrive while still maintaining good string articulation and well defined bass. Very cool. Pushing up the drive up further, I found singing violin-like sustain. Santana’s tone comes to mind, especially with the neck pickup. Yummy. Switching from “LP” to “HP” give the sound a much more modern edge, but at the expense of the instrument sounding like itself. To me, the “HP” setting sounded a little to homogeneous, though I can see where it would work in a more modern rock/metal setting.
The OCD also worked well with the 12AX7 channel. As with the EF86 channel, I tend to dial the volume in at around 11:00 to get a clean or edge of breakup sound. Kicking in the OCD worked well to go between the amp’s basic on-the-edge tone to solid, crunch distortion.
Very cool. The OCD works very well with this amp and gives enough flexibility that I no longer feel a need to rush out and buy a different amp. Not bad for $159.