Van Weelden Royal Overdrive

In 2008 I got a request from one of my best friends and a world famous guitar player to design and build an overdrive pedal with a sound quality like never heard before. A pedal that had to be very rich in terms of musical harmonics with much clarity to make a great lead sound with both humbucker and single coil pickups. Since a full tube pedal, with the options that we now have on the Royal Overdrive, would have been way to expensive, we decided to come up with a solid state pedal. As you might know, we have been working with tubes for many years so we knew that this would be a real challenge and maybe almost impossible to accomplish. Just making a lot of distortion isn’t really that hard, but it’s a completely different story if you want to have a musically rich harmonic distortion where you can hear every string when playing chords with lots of sustain and also preserve the specific characteristics of the type of guitar you are playing.

Research

First we started to check out some popular pedals for a reference but surprisingly, a lot of them were based on a tube screamer. However, since we had our own personal ideas about a good overdrive sound, none of these seemed to be a good basis for us to start from to get the dynamic and harmonic sound impact that we wanted to achieve. So, we decided not to take the easy way by using any of the existing circuits. We chose to explore other possibilities and started our own design completely from scratch! This approach seems to be pretty unique these days and very, very time consuming. It would have been a lot easier if we had chosen the other way. But hey, we wanted to make an original. Looking back now, we definitely made the right choice in 2008.

Breakthrough

After 2 years of experimenting and building several test circuits we finally had a breakthrough and found the sound that we were looking for. This was the basis for the design of the Royal Overdrive. From that moment on we started to work on all the other options we had in mind to make the Royal Overdrive a very versatile and extremely flexible pedal. After another 2 years of prototyping, trails and errors we were more than satisfied and amazed by the end result so we finally froze the design.

Result

The Royal Overdrive has become a well balanced, very dynamic, powerful and professional solid state overdrive pedal. The tube like sound and especially the “elastic” tube sound where the notes seem to explode of your pick is probably something you never heard and felt from a pedal before in your life!

What makes the Royal Overdrive so special?

It takes close to 400 hi-quality parts to build a Royal Overdrive, which is almost 25 times as much as some of the popular vintage units had! The Royal Overdrive has a completely internally isolated and flexible wide range DC input power circuit for absolute quiet performance. This was an expensive but necessary move we had to make and it will allow you to use all types of 9VDC to 18VDC adapters, even a modern switching power supply, without having any hi frequency switching noise and most of all, no ground loops because of the power supply! The Royal Overdrive also has a very hi quality PC board for the best audio performance and circuit stability. The Royal Overdrive is the most “amp friendly” pedal in the world and can be used on any amp including solid state amps. Try the Royal Overdrive in front of one and you will be amazed how tube like your whole setup will sound! The Royal Overdrive has outstanding hi headroom dynamics and a super tight, powerful low-end crunch. Together with the wide frequency range, the excellent pick attack and articulation, the Royal Overdrive is an absolute must have for the professional and amateur guitarist who is serious about his or her tone! The unique 6 position preset bright circuit will help you to match your Royal Overdrive with any guitar amp. The Royal Overdrive sounds superb both in clean and crunch mode. You will never have to make a compromise on your clean sound because the pedal and amp combination can act as a real 2 channel setup. The Royal overdrive has a full frequency hi headroom buffered bypass mode and is designed for use in live situations as well as at bedroom levels. It can be used for any style of music.