16 of the Best Compact Tweed Style Drive Pedals

One of Boss's notable COSM digital modelling drives which for some reason failed to gain sufficient support to sustain it. I nevertheless think this is a pretty great sounding Tweed style drive with few of those artefacts present which often typify digital modelling tones. You get 6 controls here including dual-concentric pots at either end - Presence | Middle | Bass | Treble | Level | Gain. There's a few of these around on Reverb.com at the moment, and since they're not much in demand you can find genuine bargains out there - worth it for the tone controls alone!

The first of a couple of offerings from Catalinbread is their take on the early Fender Bassman Amps - those were originally intended for Bass players but found favour with many a guitar player too. You get 4 control dials - Presence | Tone | Master | Volume - with a push-button switch for Hi/Lo gain character. Both Catalinbread 'Tweeds' have been in their catalogue for a while which is testament to their ongoing popularity.

Catalinbread's take on the much loved classic 5E3 amp - possibly the most DIY'd amp style of all time owing to its inherent simplicity of circuit design. Here you get significantly more tone-shaping control courtesy of 3-band EQ alongside the usual Volume and Gain. The 5F6 and No. 55 have different core tonal profiles - owing much to the originals' speaker number and arrangement. Each version here has its own fans.

CTC's very recent Falcon drive pedal combines a 5E3 Tweed Deluxe and a 6G2 Brownface Princeton via '55/'61 mode switch. You get 3 controls - Output | Volume | Tone. Another very credible Tweed type drive here with a high degree of versatility, although not quite as wide-ranging in some ways as the Sparkling Yellow above.

Greer are justifiably celebrated in particular for their low and medium gain drive pedals, and while the Tomahawk is not quite as widely lauded as say the Lightspeed or Southland it is still another fine take on the Tweed - here with three controls - Volume, Drive and Treble.

J Rockett's Monkeyman is slightly unusual as it is the only one here which takes on the reverb part of the source amp too. There are just 3 controls - Volume, Speaker Breakup and Sping Reverb - so you get the full Tweed-Verb experience in a single box. There's obviously pros and cons for having the reverb included in the same box - I have the Mad Professor #1 which does a similar thing with included reverb and that actually works pretty well too.

Lovepedal's High Power is a classic of the type also - with just 2-way gain switch and volume and drive dials. It looks to replicate tones from the Tweed Twin through to the smaller Tweed Deluxe amp. For such a simple pedal there's a surprising degree of range onboard.

This is Mad Professor's original take on the Tweed format - based on the larger Tweed amps of the time - like the Tweed Twin. You have 4 controls - Volume | Drive | Tone | Presence. This pedal has generally been very well received and has been in the Mad Professor range for a number of years now.

Mad Professor launched this a little over a year ago around Winter NAMM 2018 - aimed at replicating the smaller Tweed amps - like the Tweed Deluxe - this has a slightly gutsier feel to it Than the Big Tweedy Drive, and I really loved it from first introduction - it's been on my wishlist since. Bizarrely though this pedal has failed to find favour with Tweed fans as Mad Professor announced they were retiring it barely a year after its launch. I still rather like it though and will try and pick one up at a good price. The pedal has 2-Band EQ alongside the usual Volume and Drive.

Although not specifically designated as 'Tweed' style, Menatone nevertheless has a couple of pedals that cover / overlap on that territory. The Foxy Brown and the Dirty Blonde or Dirty B as referenced here - 4 knob and 6 knob varieties respectively. This is along the lines of the Sparkling Yellow OD3 above which aims to cover off a variety of classic Fender tones. You get 3-band EQ alongside Volume, Soul and Gain, where Soul is essentially the degree of compression - a sort of gain structure. Brian Mena makes some really great drive pedals, and this one is definitely right up there.

And so onto my current weapon of choice - Sheldon Ens' True North Pedals' Tweed Drive which is really what properly turned me onto the possibilities of the Tweed genre. You get 5 controls here - Drive, Volume and Tone dials alongside Diode Clipping Switch (twin LED) and Fat / Boost Switch. By preference I have both toggle switches Up/On - with Drive and Volume around 2 to 3 o'c and Tone around 12:30. The build quality and attention to detail here is superb - and there's just something so fitting about this beautiful artisan proper tweed-wrapped enclosure.

This German-made pedal is something of an outlier here - I've only seen these for sale at Effect-Boutique.de to date - while BSM itself specialises in Boost Pedals - Treble Boosters in particular. The pedal has a fairly unusual side-dials arrangement for Volume and Gain and not much else besides. Despite having just two controls though there is plenty of range on tap - should be sufficient for most.

This pedal is pretty new to me, not sure how long it has been in circulation - but I came across it by chance while initially doing this research some weeks ago now, and then as luck would have it Reverb.com / Andy Martin did a Tone Report on it very recently. The pedal is Japanese-designed and made by hitherto unknown Umbrella Company - and features 6 different controls as such - Volume, Gain, Bass, Treble and Saturate and Amp Type toggle switches. The former is an on/off switch, while the latter is a 3-way D, T and B mode switch. D represents Tweed Deluxe, T is Tweed Twin, while B is a sort of gain-boosted version of 'T'. This is a really compelling pedal which demands further consideration.

Introduced around 2012 I believe, this pedal has been discontinued for some years now alas. I'm not sure why it failed to take off sufficiently, by all accounts it was well received at the time. But as I've indicated in the intro - while certain pedals are perennial classics, the fortunes of others sort of waxes and wanes - and the Tweed type seems to be one of the more cyclical ones. Which seems to be in the ascendancy again right now, but evidently was fading out at the time of this Tweed '57. Said pedal comes with 3-band EQ, Volume and Gain, alongside Normal/Bright/Treble Input Selector toggle-switch. I've always thought this pedal sounded pretty good, so I can only assume that its uptake was insufficient for it to keep its place in the Wampler range.

This vertical edition of the classic Zvex '59 Sound Tweed plus boost pedal has been around a little over a year now, and was one of those recent-ish Zvex pedals that went onto my wishlist at the time. I of course have a very long wishlist with shifting priorities, and once I had acquired the True North Tweed Drive I felt I really did not need any other, but this still remains on the list of nice-to-haves for me. You get a Boost level control here alongside the usual Volume, Tone and Drive. It's a really versatile pedal in a neat format - and one that will probably end up in my tone library at some stage.