Blues Driver vs Tube Screamer vs Klon – Overdrive Battlefield!

Guitar players might have several guitars, multiple amplifiers, some modulation, and delay pedals. They might even have some fuzzes and distortion pedals they use alternatively. Yet, the one thing we’re most picky about is our overdrive tone.

Some believe the Blues Driver is the Japanese holy grail of grainy tone. Others (myself included) think the Tube Screamer is the best overdrive to ever make it out of Japan. Finally, some are willing to spend an enormous amount of money on an original Klon or one of its many, many clones.

Which is your favorite? Do you know the differences between them?

Well, I’ll do my absolute best to pour three decades of knowledge into an in-depth post about the best-selling, most widely-used overdrive pedals in modern music.

Oh, and stay until the end because I’m going to tell you exactly what I do with my overdrive pedals to get a unique tone I love.

Ready or not, here we go; it’s overdrive time!

The Boss Blues Driver

We’ll start with the Boss BD-2 Blues Driver, a pedal that has carved its own niche in the overdrive world.

To be honest with you, I came across this pedal not so long ago and found something in it that called my attention right away. The EQ is different, the amount of gain is different, and it reacts differently to my playing style too.

All I can say upfront is that it wasn’t a bad surprise at all.

A Little History

The year was 1995 and Grunge dominated the global music scene. Although Cobain’s sad passing had already left a big hole in the heart of an entire generation of musicians and music lovers, his musical legacy was going strong.

Yet, behind the curtains of the mainstream charts, blues was making a stellar comeback. The debut album of soon-to-be blues greats Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Johnny Lang made it to the public that same year along with Gary Moore’s uncanny Still Got the Blues, and Buddy Guy’s equally impressive and era-defining Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues.

In that scenario, and taking advantage of the supercharged boost the Grunge generation gave its products, the Boss pedal company released the Blues Driver. A pedal designed to satisfy the needs of a new generation of blues legends in the making, an overdrive for a sonic world that had dramatically changed its landscape.

Soon after, the pedal was spotted on the pedalboard of virtuosos the size of Steve Vai, Prince, and old-school rockers like Billy Duffy.

But that’s not all, and although sequels are hardly better than the original, entering the new millennium, pedal guru Robert Keeley did a mod on an original BD-2 giving new life to the pedal. This new mod allowed players to access a different enhanced circuit making the BD-2 a much more versatile unit.

Since those became highly sought-after pieces, the company released the BD-2W, a Waza Craft version of it with a new switch. This selects between “Standard” Blues Driver tones and “Custom” fatter, more tenacious, and bolder overdrive sounds.

Finally, and like every other Boss pedal of this series, the BD-2 enjoys a reputation for being “indestructible”, easy to find, and capable of great sounds.

Sound Description

What makes the Blues Driver a different type of overdrive than the rest on this list? Well, the answer is simple, it sounds different from the rest. To begin with, it’s a transistor-based pedal, which gives it a raspier sound and an overall grittiness that the other overdrives just don’t have.

But let’s start from the beginning because my first sonic adventures with this pedal were in search of the blues tone it promises. I tried working my way there by not pushing the amp’s level (plugged into my Fender Deluxe Reverb ’65 reissue) but dialing the right amount of gain and volume on the pedal over a clean platform.

The sweet spot for grainy but fairly clean blues leads came with all three knobs almost at noon. In this setting, the character of the guitar you’re playing shines through. Going back and forth between a single-coil Telecaster, P-90s, and humbuckers gave me a perfect rendition of each guitar.

As you might imagine, humbuckers got creamy and round, P-90s barked and bit and single coils had that beautiful crispy quality behind the gain. Believe me that, mixed with some pretty valve-driven reverb and a little vibrato from the amp I could have convinced Tarantino to direct another Western movie.

But one of the keys of this pedal is that it’s not just an overdrive pedal, it’s much more than that. It’s a pedal that can work as your main dirt pedal as well for leads and crunchy rhythms.

To get that setting I dialed it all at 3 o’clock and, boy, this thing came alive! It transformed from a mild bluesy tone to an aggressive distortion. I played power chords, riffs, and even some Bon-Jovi-approved leads with a little bit of delay courtesy of my pal, the Carbon Copy.

In this setting, I have to say that it works perfectly well with humbuckers while single-coil pickups tend to sound a little too muddy. In my opinion, it loves the compression of high-gain pickups. Together they create creamy, buttery leads, fierce power chords, and mighty single-note riffs.

P-90s were also very happy with this setting because the pedal is quite moderate in its EQ and doesn’t push the pickups so hard. As a result, the natural midrange and bite of my SG Jr. came across perfectly well.

Finally, the single-coil pickups failed to cut through that dense mix and got lost in translation. The muddiness of the original BD-2 in that scenario is what the Waza Craft comes to solve. Furthermore, it was the great vision of Robert Keeley that pioneered that mod transforming the bottom end, compressing the sound, and making it a better pedal.

Speaking of a better pedal, one thing that worked great in this moderate-gain scenario was cleaning it up with the volume knob of the guitar. The sparkling high-end became more notorious and the whole thing was taken to another level of clarity and punchiness.

The final setting I used on this pedal was as a clean boost. With everything except for the tone knob at 9 o’clock, I felt the pedal was pushing the amp but with enough subtlety to maintain the amp’s tone; just a little hotter and more responsive.

Addressing responsiveness, we have to talk about the tone knob, which is very responsive. It allowed me to accommodate the different guitars (going from mahogany and humbuckers to alder and single-coils), I could cut back on lows and highs as needed and get a better tone.

You can spend hours playing with this pedal and make it do a plethora of things from blues to rock to pop to anything you like.

How Does It Work in Gain Staging?

Gain staging is one of my favorite things to do in the world. To begin with, a cascade of gain is as close to finding gold as real life ever gets. You can feel how the distortion and fuzz pedals go one step further when preceded by a BD-2.

The interesting thing about this pedal is that you can use it in both positions; first and last. If you use it first with the gain and level before noon, it can easily become an always-on kind of pedal. Moreover, a distortion or a fuzz pedal builds on top of that mild gain and sounds fuller and more compressed.

On the other hand, if you were to put an overdrive pedal before the BD-2 and use it as a distortion unit, you can set everything at 3 o’clock and feel the gain get grainier and heavier but still react organically to your picking hand. Yes, the BD-2 retains that overdrive quality of being very responsive to your pick attack while delivering generous gain.

The BD-2 is easily the pedal on this list with the highest amount of available gain, fighting the Klon for the pole position.

So, in summary, it works great as an overdrive before the distortion or as a distortion after the overdrive. Bear in mind, though, that it doesn’t get along so well with single-coil pickups when the gain is close to maximum. For that, you’d need a Tube Screamer before.

My Favorite Use

The use I enjoyed the most with this pedal was as a spicy overdrive in front of a clean valve amp. Yes, with the gain and level knobs at about 1 or 2 o’clock (depending on how hot guitar pickups are) I could retain the amp’s character while adding generous gain to the resulting sound.

The amp’s natural dynamics added to the pedal’s overdrive quality and responsiveness to pick attack making a stellar, groovy, semi-distorted tone I fell in love with.

The Ibanez Tube Screamer

Although the Ibanez Tube Screamer has many different iterations like the TS-9, TS-808, and TS-10 among many others, the spirit of the pedal is the same across the board. I’m the lucky owner of a ‘90s TS-9 and an ‘80s TS-808. Both are steady on my pedalboard and fulfill different tasks.

Just for the sake of this experiment, I took both out and did all kinds of experiments with the knobs to get more sounds out of them… and have more fun, of course.

A Little History

The birth of the Tube Screamer, believe it or not, has Roland/Boss as a protagonist next to Ibanez. Why is this? Well, because by 1979, when Nisshin, the company that made pickups for some Ibanez guitars, developed its first version of the Tube Screamer, Boss had already released the OD-1. A pedal that’s no longer being built by Boss.

The patent Boss had for the OD-1 was for solid-state asymmetrical clipping. This left no choice for the Tube Screamer but to work on solid-state symmetrical clipping.

“Wait, not so fast, Brainiac! What’s all that technical mumbo jumbo?”

Don’t worry, let me explain. Asymmetrical clipping means that the signal that goes through the circuit doesn’t get distorted equally in the top and bottom end. This is exactly what happens with tubes. Well, symmetrical clipping moves away from what everyone was doing at the time.

But that’s not all, because the TS-808 was one of the first guitar pedals to ever feature an integrated circuit (IC) chip, the famous JRC4558D. All other pedals were built around transistors (like the BD-2).

This is, by no means, a detail. On the contrary, it’s one of the reasons behind the vocal quality and beautiful mid-infused tone we all love, and that has made it a legend since day one.

By 1982, the pedal got a major makeover and the TS-9 line saw the light. The footswitch got bigger; the pedal case became closer to the competition but the smoothness wasn’t as silky. Furthermore, the TS-9 is a tad brighter than its predecessor.

The eighties were a blurry time for rock musicians in general but was also somewhat of a dark period for Tube Screamers. The TS-9 was poorly received (yes, unbelievable, I know) and discontinued in 1986. It was followed by several different models including Mayer’s favorite, the TS-10 (1986 – 1993), and the infamous TS-5 (1991 – 98), a very cheap, plastic pedal that sounded as it looked, awfully.

But not all hope was lost, kids. The company came back to its senses and on the right (overdriven) track by re-releasing the original made-in-Japan TS-9 in 1992. Thanks to players like SRV, the tone of the Tube Screamer became sought-after again. The mid-infused wild bends of the blues virtuoso were something everybody wanted to mimic in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.

Well, thanks to that reissue and the four-knob TS-9 DX, the legacy was kept alive.

Moreover, we could say that legacy became bigger because with the TS-7 Tone-Lok version (2000 – 2010), the TS-808 reissue (2004), the hand-wired version (2008), and the TS-9B (2011), the first and only Tube Screamer for bass players, the family just got bigger.

For fans like me, the fact that the TS is still being made and sold is always good news. The midrange is in good hands, folks.

Sound Description

The best thing about Tube Screamers for me is what most of its detractors hate: the midrange bump. The perfection of the Tube Screamer’s EQ, in my opinion, isn’t found anywhere else in the pedal realm. Yes, the bump is positioned sonically exactly where you need it to push the guitar through whatever is between your strings and the audience.

But let’s start from the beginning, shall we?

For starters, the Tube Screamer does color your signal a lot. Those of us who love it think it colors the signal in a good way, but those who don’t think it’s not a good natural overdrive.

Yet, let me tell you that if you dial the gain to zero, the level or balance right at noon, and the tone at 11 o’clock, you have the exact amount of gain you need to push your amp naturally into an organic overdrive that’s perfect for rhythm work, blues, rock, ska, and any other musical style that loves overdrive.

Now, if you push that level or balance knob past 3 o’clock and keep that gain knob at zero, you have a spectacular clean boost that can push solos and leads through anything. Yes, even if you have the equivalent of Amazonia in frequencies to cut through, the TS will work for you.

Furthermore, if you want to cut back the high-end on your Strat as you push the gain or want to make that Les Paul a little brighter and open up its tone with a little more brightness, the tone knob is really useful. The signal won’t get muddy or swampy as long as you can work your way around it with the tone knob, the interplay between level and gain, and your guitar’s volume.

Yes, that’s another Tube Screamer trait, it reacts as a tube amp would when you lower the volume on your guitar. The whole thing quiets down musically retaining the lovely mids and everything else. This is especially true if you play with P-90s or single-coil pickups. You can go from really gainy to really quiet by just turning your volume knob.

What else can you do with your TS? Is it a good distortion pedal? Well, one thing I did many, many times was to use a mildly driven Tube Screamer in front of an already-driven amp. A great combination is with a Marshall JCM800. It can be the perfect pedal to tighten that massive low end and drive it to distortion using only the amp’s preamp knob.

Finally, one of my favorite uses for this pedal is as an always-on addendum to my tone. Yes, I truly feel something’s missing whenever I don’t have it on. I could do my best Steven Tyler impersonation and sing “There’s a hooooole in my tooooone” if that little red light goes off.

But that’s just me, I love that mid-bump. The Tube Screamer is my desert-island pedal.

How Does It Work in Gain Staging?

Gain staging with a Tube Screamer is fun. But do you know what’s even more fun? Stacking two Tube Screamers! This is exactly what I do with my TS-9 and my TS-808. They have distinct tones. While the 808 is a tad cleaner and smoother, it’s also a bit darker. The TS-9 is better to go on top of the 808 if you want it for leads.

On the contrary, as an always-on pedal and an eventual next-level gain push, I would go into the TS-9 first and then the 808. This is because the brightness of the TS-9 is a nice aid to open the tone of any guitar. Then, the creaminess of the 808 makes the tone go into a ferocious lead sound that can cut through any and everything.

Don’t believe I bring mayhem while I jump around on stage with just a couple of OD pedals on. Oh no, I have lots of fun playing with the TS-9 and the Tech21 Double Drive (a hidden gem) or the Big Muff. The mix between the Big Muff and the Tube Screamer truly pushes the fuzz forward. I can’t play that pedal without a Tube Screamer anymore. It just lacks something.

My Favorite Use

Having to choose only one, I’ll go for the always-on mode. This way I feel my overall tone fuller, bolder, and more ferocious. Furthermore, I do this for swapping guitars a lot. I play with my SG Jr with a P-90 in the bridge with the TS-9 with the gain at zero and volume at noon.

Whenever I switch to the neck pickup of my Mustang, I turn off the TS-9 and turn on the 808 with the gain at 9 o’clock and the balance (level) at 2 o’clock. That way, I can make up for the natural volume difference between these guitars and enjoy them both equally.

The Klon Clones

The Klon has been the elite-level overdrive pedal most celebrities have relied upon in the past decades. In terms of guitars, we could think about a holy grail, something unattainable like a ´59 Les Paul or a ’62 Stratocaster, or even a ’52 Telecaster. Amps-wise this would be a Dumble.

Nowadays, even though the originals are even harder to find and way more expensive, you can get one of the zillion Klon clones out there. We’ll be reviewing my favorite here, one of the closest to the original, the J. Rockett Archer Ikon.

A Little History

We all know the Centaur is one of Greek mythology’s best-known creatures. Well, if such a thing as Mount Olympus existed among guitar players, we could say that the Klon Centaur has its place secured. Yes, we’re talking about the most expensive used pedal money can buy.

But why’s the Klon such a big deal? Well, the late ‘80s saw its creator, Bill Finnegan, gigging in big clubs where he could crank his tweed Twin Reverb and unleash his Telecaster’s mighty powers.

Those happy days had this guitarist playing with the amp at 7 or 8. If you’ve ever pushed tubes that hard on a tweed amp, you’ll know there’s a tidal wave of natural harmonic overtones and a super-fast, beautiful transient with generous lows, and a bright Fender-esque high-end.

In the ‘90s, he played smaller places rather than bigger places. This means the Twin had to be set to 4 at the most. All that gorgeous natural overdrive and compression were gone.

He went after those sought-after ‘80s Tube Screamers early ‘90s players were crazy about. But he found out that pedals change the sound of the amp too much. He disliked the midrange bump and, since he tried TS-9s, he found them a bit too bright. They took away that amazing low-end a pushed amp has.

Well, we need to let Bill know that no pedal sounds like a cranked tweed Twin. You had your golden years, pal. But Bill wasn’t someone who would surrender to reality and just conform to what the market had to offer.

As it usually happens, a great invention comes from a need that couldn’t be fulfilled.

It took four-and-a-half years of tweaking and the recruiting of an MIT graduate, Fred Fenning, to make his prototype a reality. This duo created the perfect transparent overdrive that sounded like nothing else on Earth.

But that’s not it. He made every single one of the 8,000 units known to exist by hand. He also tested and shipped them personally. They came out with black epoxy over the circuit so nobody could find out what did what.

From 1994 to 2008 circuitry was a mystery but he published the original designs in 2008, right after he stopped making them. Once published, it was revealed that the Klon wasn’t just a TS copy, but an entirely new creation.

One of the tricks Bill used was to add a very rare clean signal blend function in the drive pot. What this did was create a cleaner, more open overdrive that only blends with pure distortion when the control is maxed out. The natural dynamics of the guitar and the original tone are kept uncompressed and vastly unmodified.

Another trick was that the pedal would convert the 9V current it received to 18V so it worked with a bigger headroom. Adding to this, the pedal features a “hard-clipping” circuit like you would find in a high-gain pedal as a ProCo Rat. This is opposed to a “soft-clipping” circuit like the Tube Screamer and the Blues Driver have. Yes, the Klon has a lot of gain to dial in if you want to, but with the blend control, it stays clear throughout.

Finally, most overdrive pedals are made using silicon diodes. The Klon, on the other hand, uses higher-quality, more unique Germanium diodes. These ooze smoothness and deliver a much more harmonically-rich overdrive.

The transparent overdrive is an engineering wonder. Since the circuit’s been out, countless klones have appeared. The man himself even released one called KTR in 2014. Each unit read on the chassis "Kindly remember: The ridiculous hype that offends so many is not of my making."

Sound Description

Well, Bill and I might not share some of his statements about the TS-9 (how dare you, genius!) but he created a pedal that’s this famous and expensive for a very good reason. It adds so much to the signal with such a rich and organic feel.

The good thing about the J.Rockett Archer Ikon is that the company got a hand on Germanium diodes and recreated the original circuit 100% to spec. Yes, it even converts voltage inside to 18 volts.

As you know, in every magician’s hat there’s a hidden trick. So, even though it’s built to spec, it lacks the fairy dust Bill put on the original ones. In a word, it doesn’t sound or cost like the original, but it’s very, very close. As close as you can get.

The idea of the Klon is to use it first in your signal chain to play the guitar with that stellar, celestial overdriven tone keeping your guitar’s tone intact and pushing you forward.

That was my first setting, the treble knob at noon, the gain very low and generous volume at around 2 o’clock. Man, this thing can really uplift your tone from great to amazing. The transient is lightning-fast and the harmonic overtones flow like water.

I kept everything as it was and moved from the Tele to the humbuckers and got a much fatter tone that would open up nicely and musically when I increased the treble knob. Oh, and of course, I cranked the gain knob while having that guitar on and all that was subtle and tranquil about this pedal transformed into a wild beast ready to take over the room. Let me tell you there’s enough gain in this pedal to cover everything from boosted cleans to overdriven tones all the way to rocking, distorted sounds.

Do you want to know the best of it all? It kept the guitar and amp character throughout our sonic journey.

To my ears, I would say that it lacked some magic dust in the midrange. I missed that small bump that the Tube Screamer gives my tone and that allows me to cut the fabric of reality while I bend that G string like there’s no tomorrow.

Other than that, and for those in search of a clean boost or an organic overdrive that’s transparent but versatile, this is the pedal.

How Does It Work in Gain Staging?

Gain staging with this pedal is as easy as it gets. If you happen to love the way your distortion pedal and your amp sound together, this will just add some hair to the tone. I tried, for example, cranking my Deluxe Reverb with this pedal on top at a low gain setting and it was a beautiful experience. It kept the grain of the overdrive intact and enhanced the pick-attack response.

It did something very close to that with the Double Drive but didn’t quite enjoy it with the Big Muff. It’s such a transparent pedal that it gets lost in translation with such a wall of distorted sound. It added nothing to the final mix.

So, let me summarize it like this: This pedal doesn’t need any gain staging, but if you were to mix it (which seems like watering down fine whiskey) you should do it with a not-so-gainy distortion pedal.

I did the opposite and added a TS before the Klon (yes, I know, I’m a sinner) and it proved to be a great distortion pedal as well.

My Favorite Use

The way I enjoyed this pedal the most was on top of an already pushed signal. This gave me even more harmonic overtones, enhanced pick attack, and made for an overall killer tone I just couldn’t stop playing with. Yes, the neighbors made me stop yelling at my window but it was amazing while it lasted.

Where to Put Overdrive Pedals in your Pedalboard?

This is a question I get a lot. I have two answers to it.

As the first pedal in the chain – I put my overdrive right after the Wah pedal and before the distortion/fuzz pedals. This allows me to add delay and reverb (and whatever else I want) to an overdriven or distorted signal. Believe me, the Carbon Copy’s trails become more interesting this way.

As a boost after a distortion pedal – I’m going to get into detail with this when we reach the end and tell you about my favorite TS trick of all time. But let me tell you that as soon as you turn on an overdrive pedal after a distortion pedal, the signal focuses and turns HD. It’s great for leads.

My Favorite Trick

Let me tell you about my own move, the one I call my special sauce. I love going from the TS-9 into the Big Muff into the TS-808.

What you get when you turn all of that on is that pack of rhinoceroses galloping with a razor-like midrange in high definition. The effect when you step on the 808 is as if you ignite the turbo. The signal cleans up and focuses so you’re pushed forward in the mix.

It all happens without losing one bit of sonic weight or disengaging the nasty element.

There you go, use it without any discretion, it sounds great.

The Bottom End

Nothing is written in stone when it comes to overdrive pedals. Each guitarist gets to choose what suits their playing style best. In my opinion, each of these pedals can generate enough legendary tones to build a solid sonic empire.

That said, I have my favorite, the Tube Screamer, and I have been using it to sculpt my tone for decades. I just miss it when it’s not ON, and I’ve found many uses for it the more I’ve used it. Yes, the relationship we have with our favorite overdrive pedal builds, morphs, and evolves.

So, if you don’t have a favorite one yet, go out there, try them all, find the sweet spot, and let the magic of the right overdrive pedal take you to sonic bliss every time you play the instrument.

Life’s too short to be lived playing through the wrong overdrive.

Happy (overdriven) playing!