So I just bought a couple pedals from this Chinese company called Joyo, one called the Ultimate drive and the other a tremolo pedal. I had been seeing them on eBay for a while so I figured I'd give them a try.

The ultimate drive is supposedly a clone of the fulltone OCD, which I've never actually played. But I must say this pedal sounds pretty darn good and the construction is surprisingly solid. It has a fairly transparent tone, although it gets a little too bassy when the drive is kicked up past noon. The sound is nothing like your traditional tube screamer type pedal, which I never really cared for. It's smooth sounding and doesn't have that midrange honk. It also doesn't have a fizzy sounding high end like many OD pedals I've played, excellent! It can go from a mild slightly overdriven amp sound to an almost metal tone. Cleans up nicely when volume on guitar is rolled back as well. One note worth mentioning is that it is very sensitive to where it is in the pedal chain, the tone and volume will change drastically, it sounds best when it's at the beginning of the chain. I recommend using a battery over an adapter, seems to smooth out the distortion a bit. Overall it's well worth the $39 I paid.

The tremolo pedal is just ok, nothing to write home about IMO. It also suffers from a volume drop like many other trem pedals. I was hoping for more out of this one, if it didn't have such a volume dip I would probably be into it more. $39 also

Both pedals are supposedly true bypass, but I am not so sure. I can hear slight pulsing of the trem when the OD us on in front of it, I wouldn't think true bypass would do that.

If you're looking for a different OD pedal I would recommend this one, skip the tremolo.

Sorry I don't have any links, but you can find them easily doing a quick search.

The Joyos are pretty accurate copies with a few minor differences.

There was one company called Freakish Blues that was buying them in bulk at ridiculous prices like $15 a pop and then repainting the enclosures and epoxying the internals and selling them for £150-200 as boutique stompoxes.

This was uncovered on a DIY forum that i visit where someone had sent one in to be degooped so he could get it traced and build a clone for a friend as they really liked it and then when all the epoxy was gone it was the JOYO pedal even with the branding on the PCB and everything with only 1 capacitor being changed.

I came across that pedal because of that same article on the freakish blues controversy. It's a decent pedal, my main gripes with it are that it is too bassy, and it loses some note definition, especially when playing arpeggios across strings. Other than that it sounds pretty good, much better for single coils as opposed to humbuckers. Certainly not as good as it's hyped up to be. You should still try it though, definitely worth $40.

I've had a Joyo British Sound for a few months now and it's a pretty cool overdrive pedal.The 3-band EQ is quite effective,while the voicing control ["from Plexi to modded JCM800"] changes the gain structure quite a bit,though I find the higher gain JCM800 mod settings to sound more convincing and musical.Not a bad deal for around $45.



Ed