TC Electronic CINDERS OVERDRIVE Tube-Like with Extremely Responsive and Expressive Feel

Well made and has a really lovely warm overdriven sound. I have 5 other overdrive pedals of different price ranges and types. Very happy with this one. Definitely brings its own unique warm tone to the party. Lots of low end growl when you turn up the drive. Yet it is surprisingly quiet with only very slight hum when at maximimum drive and output. I use it on a pedal board that goes into a di box and into laptop and studio monitors, so i dont use an amp. This pedal is now 2nd in the pedal chain and really adds that real tube sound. It works great on its own but also with the other pedals such as blues breaker, boost, delay and chorus placed after it. Being a real tube it is so responsive to how you play. Pick lightly with guitar volume rolled off and its quite clean but yet stiĺl warm sounding with good definition. Bring up the volume and/ or pick hard and it distorts beautifully. It doesnt have tone controls but I can tweak that with my eq pedal. With single coils it sounds wonderful. With humbuckers it sounds a lot heavier, more like fuzz. Its an absolutely brilliant pedal and would be worth the investment if it was 3 times the price. If you dont have a valve amp and want that warm organic drive then for 60 quid you cant go wrong with this pedal. Also there's the option to swap out the tube for another type if you should want to. I wont be changing though as love the sound of it. Its now a permanent fixture on my board for sure. No frills, just well made and sounds wonderful. Highly recommend.

I love this overdrive! I was on a hunt for that perfect tone( I enjoy Clapton, Mayer SRV, as well as Neil Young and the band - and play a deluxe American strat into a fender blues junior.), so I spent a week trying this alongside: ehx crayon, ehx soul food, joyo vintage OD, and a fulltone ocd. The mojo won! I was looking for something that could provide everything from a warm, clean boost to a dirty powerful overdrive. I particularly wanted a responsive tone that would allow me to move from totally clean to fairly dirty just by varying playing pressure. The mojo provides exactly that. Once I'd found my settings, I haven't had to change them! I can access a huge range of tones just by adjusting picking attack. I love a responsive tone.I found this most similar to the ehx crayon and it was a close call. In terms of tone, the mojo is just a little darker, and I compensate by boosting the treble, which gives a sound that, to my ears, is just a touch fuller than the crayon. Some say the mojo can get 'muddy' but I think that's only true if you boost the 'drive' and play it hard. I have it set up with the drive barely dialed in, and the 'level' way up. Here my tone is good and clear and the overdrive is very natural. I'm not sure if this would sit well with a solid state amp, but tubes respond nicely. It also works well when stacked with a little compression - I have a fender micro compressor running into this which gives a great sound for lead lines.This ultimately won against the crayon because of the lower price, and the very easy access on the back - the battery compartment is secure but can be opened in seconds. I'm finding that tc electronics are featuring more and more on my pedal board!

I don't think it's necessary to talk about the actual sounds of this pedal - Youtube reviews are out there that do a far better job of that than any amount of talk would do. But there are still plenty of good features here that make this pedal a nice and not extreme source of overdriven sounds. There's always the Dark Matter pedal from the same company if you really want to "filthy up" your guitar sound.A lot of the function of this pedal seems to be about thickening up the guitar sound, especially down at the bass end, as the "voice" switch and the bass control do a lot of add some "oomph" (an industry term) to the signal. I've found myself with the treble control set usually at 12 o'clock and the bass somewhere around the dial between there and max. This seems to work really nicely on single-coil guitars such as Strats and Teles. It just adds a bit of authority to the sound. The drive control is where all the magic is done regarding the overdrive itself (rather than the tone of that overdrive), it's really just a gain knob, but the distortion it brings in can be really nicely contoured with the tone controls - it's actually a lot of fun just to sit there playing and tweaking, because the controls all do something useful to the sound even if sometimes it's a bit subtle.The pedal is not in any way extreme. It doesn't do a single wacky "sound effect", everything it puts out can be used in a mix (some pedals - usually modulation ones - have settings you try out and then quickly shy away from; not this one).The only control left to cover is the level, which is in a sense the practical control that lets you set the overdriven level and the bypass level as you like. Some people want to hear a volume boost when overdriven because they'll be soloing in a live performance, and with a bit of tweaking here you can get that to your liking. I actually like the levels to be similar because I'm recording parts more often, and I don't like to upset the levels at the recording end by adding a dollop of boost (I can always boost levels in the mix afterwards). Being able to balance the levels gives me the ability to record at the optimal gain settings for clean and dirty sounds, and this control really gives me good control over that.What's also nice is that with the pedal being subtle if you set it up that way, it can be used as a pretty clean boost into an amplifier to help with the amp's overdriven sound, or feed in a little crunch to take the amp over the edge. The sound can get messy if taken too far, but it's nice to have a second stage of options for dialling in your ideal overdriven sound rather than just a boost pedal.The battery compartment on the back opens with a large screwhead that you can use a coin to undo, but it's central in the back plate so if you velcro the pedal to a board you'll need to leave a space if using batteries. I don't bother, instead using a One-Spot Pro power brick to supply 9v into the port on the back of the casing.Summing up, I think the pedal might be a bit subtle for some tastes, and the Dark Matter might be a more hooligan choice for those folks, but it works really nicely on my single-coil instruments, although somewhat less well on humbucker-equipped guitars, or even ones with P90s. You might also find that you need to roll off the bass response on guitars that already have a lot of of bass frequency, or limit yourself to a single pickup if you usually mix between pickups - the sound can muddy-up and require a bit of experimentation to get the best guitar/amp settings for this pedal.Given a bit of playing with settings on all parts of the chain from guitar to amp, though, you're almost guaranteed to find a really sweet sound in here that would be hard to live without.