musictoyznetwork | 8 years ago

The Festival Overdrive is a dual-mode overdrive. It features a master volume control and a boost channel with both gain and volume controls. There is a selectable clipping/compression circuit and two tone shaping controls - body and bright. One foot switch bypasses the effect and another foot switch selects between the green and red channels (low gain and high gain). Watch Pete Thorn's demo above to hear the Festival in action.

Body control
The Body control on Festival is identical to Voice #1 on the Foxrox ZIM pedal. To help explain this control, here’s Dave Fox’s post at THE GEAR PAGE: “I’ve been using A Foxrox ZIM pedal on my board for 12 years. I love the voicing knob for getting cool sounds, and I found that while voices 2 through 8 are great for special effects, Voice 1 works more like a tool. It doesn't really change your tone, it just makes it fit in with the rest of the band when the volume is loud. It's a knob I adjust for different rooms, different amps, and sometimes I adjust it as the night goes on and the band gets louder. Turn it one way to make it less boomy and more bright, turn it the other way when it sounds thin.”

Clipping stages
Festival gives you two clipping options. The first is a single clipping stage, which is always active. The second is an additional stage which is selected by the Clipping stages switch. This adds a layer of soft clipping at high gain settings. The result is a slightly compressed tone, both in dynamic range and frequency range. Playing harder doesn't make you louder, it just gets more saturated. Some top and bottom goes away and is replaced with a slight amount of harmonic fizz on the top end. This makes for a more cutting tone when you need your leads to stick out.

Bypass Foot switch: True bypass with a yellow LED.
Boost Foot switch: Switch with dual-color LED to select between gain modes: standard mode (Green) and volume/drive Boost (Red).
Master volume: Controls the overall volume of the pedal. Turning it up or down affects both channels equally. This makes it easy to maintain the same rhythm-to-lead volume ratio when you need to turn your overall level up or down. Typical setting is bewteen 9:00 and 1:00. A Linear taper volume pot is used so that rotation of the knob covers a wide usable range.
Green drive: This is the rhythm drive setting. Typical setting is around 12:00.
Red drive: This controls the high gain channel and there is more available gain on this control compared to the Green Drive control. Its setting is independent of the green drive setting, they do not interact at all.
Red volume boost: This knob allows you boost volume without the drive setting or the tone of the pedal. When all the way down, no boost is added. You cannot use this knob to turn your overall level down or off, it's simply a level boost knob.
Body: This allows you to boost or cut a wide band in the low-mids region. This helps to get the right balance in different environments without drastically changing the tone. It uses a single stage of phase shift, which has a natural curve that hits the right spot. This is the same as Voice#1 on the Foxrox ZIM pedal. Turn it to the left to boost the lows and low mids. This gives a fatter, heavier sound. Turn to the right for a thinner, more trebly sound. Body has a big effect on volume, so be sure to make frequent adjustments when settings things up.
Bright: This gives you control over the very top end. Use it to control brightness and to compensate when changing Body settings.